The manufacturers could have ushered in a revolution in filesystems that would have taken full advantage of their new drives. If they had taken an approach like in "Venti" (Plan 9), and provided an underlying log-structured block archiving service, while placing SSDs in the front, they could have sold new appliances that never forget a change and respond immediately. Running out of archival space? Just plug in another SMR drive. A machine gets encrypted by malware? No problem, all the prior data is still on the archival drive. Need to compare this file to a version from 3 years ago? The backup was automatically saved.

A lot of the benefits are there in something like Time Machine, but this system is even more automated and doesn't require explicit backup steps every hour or day, nor does it need to remove backups as they get old.