All these things should be reserved for auxiliary machines like tablets. On a general-purpose computing device such as a laptop or desktop PC, I do think that file hierarchies will be deprecated, but they won't die completely. Search will be king on the desktop, and eventually will integrate both locally and remotely on the Web.
Cloud computing's uptake upshoot is ephemeral. Once it's gained as much ground as it has to, the growth rate will stagnate and the cloud will plateau.
I don't see SaaS being successful much either.
Tags and directory DAGs are the same.
Files are an old, ugly metaphor born of the file cabinet. Remember when you had to label a file and then figure out where to file it: alphabetically, client name, recency, importance, by project, etc. You even used different color labels: green meant go, red meant it's hit the fan, etc.
What seems unlikely is that the following WILL NOT happen in the next 5 years:
A way to effortlessly tag any content, anywhere and on any device in a predictive and n-dimensional way so that content is broken down to its most granular, atomic and consumable unit- a quote of a book, a lyric of a song, a smirk or a smile in a photo, a highlight clip of a video, the exact anniversary gift you intend to buy- each having its own 'GPS coordinate' on the Web, or in some emergent meta-layer fabric that hovers above and interweaves our now-Web
This much-faster way to navigate is a hyper-jump teleport to discrete coordinates, probably crowd-sourced like Waze. With combinations of tags parallax-sextant-triangulating there way more efficiently than today’s ubiquitous search query paradigm, another antiquated metaphor falls. A metaphor, no matter how popular today, I imagine not playing a major role in the future Internet
What is this next new thing? My 10 year old would say he already has it: Minecraft
Most of the time, people don't want to bother with several ortogonal tag sets. That's because most of the time, just one hierarchical set is enough, and when it's not people simply put lots of data inside a single file, and use application specific tools for dealing with it.
AI will probably change that. But untill then, no, people won't organise their data in an n-dimensional space.
File systems will fade into a protocol like HTML and slip from users minds, but will remain the hard core tools of the makers and admins of systems.
There's alot of ways you could make it more effective than the hierarchical structure we use right now.
That's the entire point of the article, The author argues the File System metaphor is going away. It doesn't mean the File System itself will cease to exist, or that it won't be ever-present in every major operating system. What the author means is that it just won't be exposed to the end-user.
And good riddance. The File System is by far the most confusing aspect of computing to newcomers and even those that have been working with computers for a while. Understanding directory structure and the way it is organized in any given operating system seems to be a big problem for people.
My experience has been the complete opposite. I find the file system, far, far more intuitive than all the ad-hoc ways various applications attempt to manage my "content" for me. With these apps that abstract away the filesystem, you can never really be sure you have the right mental model of your data. The way apps like iTunes store your data is just so opaque.
Indeed, iTunes is the perfect example of this problem. I can't count how many people have come to me utterly confused about how syncing between your hard drive, iOS, the iTunes store, and iCloud works. They can't understand it because Apple imposes an ever-shifting system of abstractions onto your music storage. You don't have music files anymore. You have songs stored in certain libraries, and those libraries can be "synced" with each other in ways that often result in strange error messages and loss of data.
Imagine instead that things worked like the old days: You just have MP3 files, and you can put them in folders. The iPhone, when connected to the computer, can be accessed like any other filesystem. You move files in and out of a folder called iPhone/Music. In this alternate reality, you'd understand exactly what you're doing. You wouldn't have to guess at how "syncing" is going to change the state of your data.
>The iPhone, when connected to the computer, can be accessed like any other filesystem. You move files in and out of a folder called iPhone/Music.
People have problems with that. You don't, but it's a big issue to a lot of people.
How about this, they turn on iTunes all their iTunes music is available. They turn on music app on their iPhones, and all their music available (streamed or downloaded). Every song they buy, is automatically synced to all their devices.
Which is easier? Which one requires you to understand "syncing", or file systems, or copy-pasting vs. moving, or a thousand other little things that you need to have a handle on, just to listen to music on your devices.
As soon as you run into the need to move content seamlessly between programs, devices, and services--in ways the makers didn't necessarily imagine--you need some kind of universal means of interchange. Something that is infinitely flexible and controlled by the user. As it turns out, we've had this for a while: files.
Now, you can ask for tweaks to the way the filesystem is used. Want the primary interface model to be searching, rather than browsing through folders? Ok, that's great. Things like Spotlight are already a step in that direction, and they can be enhanced. Want tagging? Sure! While I don't see it heavily integrated into current operating systems, I'd imagine it would be very doable.
But none of this is incompatible with the current filesystem model. It would just be a layer on top.
This is exactly how Android works. I plug my Galaxy into my computer and it appears just like any other USB drive. I drag mp3 files, or folders of mp3 files, into my Music folder, and I'm done. Same goes for mp4 videos I might want to watch, or PDF files I might want to read, etc.
Is that not the way iOS devices work?
> Younger generations .. will [not] care about hierarchically organizing data and content.
Maybe. (nothing to do with younger though) Search/tagging/labeling has come about as close to replacing standard file systems as anything. Google tried this approach with gmail. They came close. They still ended up with some hierarchy structure.
Nonsense like this comes up every so often and it's always based on a myopic and naive view of computing, and of the general public's use of computers.
File systems are necessary because files need to move between applications and devices. File systems are already an abstraction, and they will continue to be useful until someone comes up with a better one. Which, at this point, seems unlikely.
Yes, your exposure to the file system on an iPad is much lower than on a MacBook Air. But it's still present. Try saving an image from the web, an email attachment, or using the Drop Box App. You may not be at a command prompt but you're dealing with the file system.
The more complicated things you want to do with a tablet, the more you're going to have to interact with the file system. A better abstraction does not yet exist, so the file system persists.
Declaring its death prior to the appearance of a better abstraction is silly.