Its charter was to build technologies for a next-generation operating system that would fulfill Bill Gates's vision of "information at your fingertips.

Cairo was announced at the 1991 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference by Jim Allchin.

[2] It was demonstrated publicly (including a demo system for all attendees to use) at the 1993 Cairo/Win95 PDC.

Content Indexing is now a part of Internet Information Server and Windows Desktop Search.

It was once planned to be implemented in the form of WinFS as part of Windows Vista but development was cancelled in June 2006, with some of its technologies merged into other Microsoft products such as Microsoft SQL Server 2008, also known under the codename "Katmai".