[qayxc]

> It'd be interesting to know why Microsoft abandoned this initiative.

There were technical issues. They simply never managed to get the system performant enough to be use as a FS replacement. There also were tons of issues with the concept itself, like proper tooling for visualising the stored objects to the user and a compatibility layer for legacy software.

It seems as if parts of it was merged into MS SQL server products [0].

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/winfs/

[monocasa]

Yeah, it was based on Jet, so if I had to guess they're probably just talking about including some perf improvements in the core database engine that they made profiling the WinFS use case.