Microsoft Research has been working on Project Silica — a glass-like write-once storage device that can store terabytes of data for 10,000 years — for well over five years now, without making any promises about its commercialization or disclosing detailed technical information. This week, the company finally detailed its mediums and end-to-end workflows in Nature, which is meant to confirm that the project is still under development, but without making any promises about commercialization.

The main concern around Project Silica is that Microsoft Research is now working in two different directions that rely on two fundamentally different physical mechanisms, which means that nothing is ready for prime time yet.