New Products Hint at Longhorn Attributes

Yesterday, I met with some members of Microsoft's Home Imaging and Publishing group to discuss Digital Image Suite 9. New product features, some deriving from Apple's iPhoto, include more sophisticated image management and search features. These new capabilities hint at some of the changes consumers and businesses can expect from Longhorn's new file system, which is supposed to make finding meaningful data easier than on existing Windows versions. Longhorn is the codename for Windows XP's successor.

As I blogged previously, Microsoft sees the finding and organizing of digital content as one of the most important features to come in Longhorn. But not just the next operating system. The new data store, which in theory is capable of improving search, is expected to appear first in the next version of SQL Server, codename Yukon. Longhorn versions of Office and other Microsoft products would support the new file system.

However, Microsoft isn't waiting that long--I've been saying around 2006--to get out some new search and file management capabilities. Digital Image Suite 9 is an excellent example that foreshadows some of the capabilities coming in the Longhorn wave of products. I would recommend that technology managers and software developers interested in Longhorn to start looking at all forthcoming Microsoft digital media products, particularly software that derives technology coming out of Microsoft Research.

Digital Image Suite 9 uses a number of techniques to ease the management or finding of digital photos. For example, the user can select a photo and then search for images of like kind. The software uses an algorithm that conducts a search based on color, contrast and facial recognition. The user might highlight a child's photo and, using the "like kind" search, bring up similiar images. Searches are reasonably fast and much more accurate than I would have expected.

Like iPhoto, Digital Image Suite 9 uses assigned keywords or categories as a way of better organizing photos and also more easily searching for them. Here, Microsoft takes advantage of metadata information stored with a file, attributes that, in theory, should be readable by other programs.

How the new Windows File System, or WinFS, treats metadata will be one of the areas Microsoft customers, partners or competitors may want to closely watch as Longhorn and Yukon development progresses. Software developers should learn as much as possible now about the WinFS approach to metadata. Competitors should watch for proprietary hooks that might make files created or stored on WinFS less portable to other operating systems.

I can't say what Microsoft's metadata strategy might be, as I haven't fully investigated this area of development yet. But the aforementioned parties should make every effort possible to learn about WinFS and its nuances as Microsoft makes information and software code available.

Posted by Joe Wilcox at August 20, 2003 10:42 AM