直接说是因为politics, 写得可以看出来带点情绪， 可能当时确实被politics阴得不轻。
正文：
I worked at Microsoft in the early 90s as the project lead for the content index, so I know exactly why Microsoft failed in this area. The reason was company politics!
Content index was the first step towards the internet search engine. Since the internet was in its infancy, our goal was limited to creating a search engine for the local disk on a PC. In 1995, when I left the company, we had a working Windows Search engine, which became part of Windows XP and which is part of Windows to this day. In fact, we implemented a distributed engine that could index several machines. Of course, scaling this thing to the whole internet would be a non-trivial task; but remember, these were still the early nineties, and we had a head start. If the management weren''t so short-sighted, we would have gotten there before Google was even established in the late 90s.
So what happened? The content index was part of project Cairo, led by Jim Allchin. It was a grandiose project that would provide a new windows shell,a new file system (OFS), and a content index. The first gross mistake was Allchin''s idea of putting the content index in the kernel of the operating system. As a project lead I decided to hedge our bets and create an alternative implementation in user space -- ostensibly for testing, since the OFS was not ready yet. I had to defend this decision at every management meeting, but it worked. The index had quickly became indispensable for the whole XP team, successfully indexing all their sources. (We actually had a feature that would let you find the definition of a function, or a data structure; or all its uses.)
The Windows XP team, led by Dave Cutler, was very much against Cairo, because they felt is was encroaching on their territory. There was some kind of competition or war between Allchin and Cutler, which culminated in a deal: Allchin agreed to cancel project Cairo and was rewarded with a promotion to Senior Vice President. Don''t ask me how it was possible. In a healthy company Allchin would have been fired.
So one day, we were told to abandon the content index and find a new project . That really pissed me off, so I asked for a meeting with Cutler, Allchin, and Mark Zbikowski, who was the mangager of OFS and my immediate superior. I told them that we had a working version of the content index, in user space , that had no dependency on OFS or anything else in Cairo. They let the content index stay, but soon after I was let go. The index is still there, but it''s been crippled, its development stunted, and it never had a chance to develop into an internet search engine.
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