I assume most readers are at least passingly familiar with Microsoft's abortive plans to include a new storage engine called WinFS in Windows Vista. The idea, dating back to the early 2000s, was that Windows would include a relational database-based storage engine on top of the NTFS file system. This engine would enable nearly-instant file searches and result in a new Explorer navigational scheme that abstracted hard-coded file system locations, like the C: drive and specific folders, into virtual folders that would aggregate their "contents" from multiple locations on the PC and, eventually, the local network.This is a prime example of the way Microsoft confounds users. Most users won't want to store a file in a folder only to have the operating system create virtual folders which are then called 'libraries'. All they probably want is a simple folder structure and a powerful desktop search.
WinFS sounded like a great idea to me, but it was technically complex and Microsoft originally axed it from the product. The virtual folder-based navigational scheme was also unceremoniously removed from Vista, because beta testers thought it was confusing. So while Vista does include the virtual folder subsystem, it's not a major, visible part of the system at all.
In Windows 7, this feature is making a major comeback, and my guess is that it will remain in the final product no matter how confusing it is to Microsoft's increasingly irrelevant beta testers. This time around, it's called Libraries, and like its WinFS-based predecessor, it's a scheme to abstract the file system and replace it with virtual locations that aggregate data from various system locations. Stupidly, this change has caused Microsoft to rename its special shell folders yet again, so the My Documents folder that was renamed to Documents in Vista has been renamed yet again in Windows 7, this time to Personal Documents. (The other special shell folders have similar new names.) Documents still exists in Windows 7. But now it's a virtual folder, or what Microsoft calls a Library.
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