So everyone has heard the news about WinFS delivery slipping until after Longhorn has shipped. As someone who has worked on projects with tight deadlines I can appreciate why these tough decisions are made. However, one of the things that I didn't consider when I made this post is the rise of PC search engine software (hopefully everyone who is using Outlook is also using Lookout already).
There has also been some talk about Copernic Desktop Search which teams to take the shell integration even further. So what was it that I didn't consider? Well a lot of people have loose files hanging around on their machines which aren't part of any centralised data-store. WinFS could really help in organising these files by attributing them with meta-stuff. That meta stuff would then be searchable.
If you want proof that this is important just look at Lookout and Copernic.