Microsoft is continuing to benefit from its open attitude towards research, development and release. Some functionality, products and/or features get dropped along the way but this has always been the case. I can remember that Windows 2000 Advanced Server was due to have a feature called IMDB (In Memory DataBase) which was in the betas but was dropped in the final release. There are always complaints when something is dropped as there is always someone who uses it but there is always the caveat that anything can be dropped at any time (or sometimes support cycles are defined for released products such as editions of Windows or SQL Server).

It will be interesting how much use that this feature will get in production systems.

As a developer I have little interest in this feature.

As a software engineer I have a need to understand what this feature offers.

As a software architect this could be a key feature that alters a proposed solution.