For months, Microsoft watchers have voiced concerns that delays in the company"s introduction of its Yukon database software could derail other products, including a new version of Windows, code-named Longhorn.
But Microsoft executives dispute that notion. They told CNET News.com that the delivery of Yukon--which marks the debut of the company"s key unified storage technology--won"t affect other future products. The company also for the first time gave insight into the difficulty of building the new storage technology--a pet project of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates for more than a decade and one of the most ambitious and time-consuming projects the company has ever attempted. "Microsoft"s dream is to have this unified single storage technology that we can use across products," Stan Sorensen, a product manager at the company, told CNET News.com. "As long as I have been involved in servers--more than 10 years at Microsoft--we have been trying to achieve this."
Yukon, an update to Microsoft"s SQL Server database, will usher in the storage concept. The storage technology has become a massive undertaking that will ultimately affect nearly all of the company"s key products. Microsoft said the storage technology helps to blur differences between data types and will make it far easier for people to search for and find documents, e-mail messages and multimedia files scattered across their hard disks and on networked computers.