I stuck with Windows 2000 for many years after XP was released. XP brought absolutely nothing I wanted and a lot of things I didn’t want. All the truly interesting stuff, like WinFS, never made it in.
WinFS wasn’t destined for Windows 2000 nor XP, but rather Vista.
I was an intern at Microsoft in 2004, and personally helped make it clear that WinFS also wasn’t ready anyway. Fwiw, I think the iOS model of “makes users and apps no longer care about directories” has been more successful than the original WinFS plan of “maybe it’s all a SQL-ish database instead”.
