Microsoft's Vision on Unified Store

Today Jon Udell reports the interesting Q&A session Bill Gates did at the Office conference. Particularly interesting is the point on unified store. My reaction is: Wow! We are just starting and we have already run into Microsoft's turf. On the other hand, our idea has been verified. We may be a little more advanced than theirs, too.

Fortunately, WinFS has been taken off the feature list of Long Horn, which is slated for end of 2006. So WinFS itself may be 3 years away. Also they will always come from a desktop angle. But we plan to move into a hosting model. In any case, at least several alternatives to Microsoft's should be able to survive before consolidations when maturity comes.