

Why Fred Wilson is wrong – files aren’t dead - whyleyc
http://blog.zamzar.com/2015/01/02/why-fred-wilson-is-wrong-files-arent-dead/

======
jacquesm
The commoditization (sp?) of _your_ data is what the walled gardens are all
about. So it's in the interest of companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo,
Dropbox, Microsoft and so on to remove as many of your files from your control
as they can get away and to package them in a non-file metaphor so they can
sell you your own data back, either directly through access fees or indirectly
by selling you advertising right along your own data.

I wished more people would see the endgame in situations like these: you're
going to be paying through the nose for something that was already yours.
Hosting your own data is trivial, the only case where I can see your data
moving to the cloud is for backup purposes, off-site is better than on-site in
case of disaster recovery.

So, have a good and long look at that firewall that protects you from the big
bad cyber terrorists out there. That same firewall that stops the bad guys
from coming in (and your ISP by blocking access to port 80 and a couple of
others) are what keeps the peer-to-peer potential of the web from being
realized.

So when VCs start trumpeting the 'end of files' make sure you realize what
you're giving up.

~~~
unreal37
Not worried about them selling me my own data, so much as they want to get rid
of the concept of "buy once and own it forever". The Internet megacorps have
become addicted to the idea of lifetime rental. Rent MS Office. Rent this
movie. Rent this song. They're getting rid of the concept of software and
media ownership for the sake of profit.

~~~
orf
> Rent MS Office

You can buy MS office just the same as you can before, but consumers _want_ to
rent it. I balk at shelling out hundreds and hundreds for a fully featured
copy of Office which will be out of date by the next release. Paying £50 a
year or so for an always up to date copy (with a bunch of extras like Skype
credit) is a much more attractive alternative.

> Rent this movie

Yeah, because when has that ever been a thing?

> Rent this song

And when will this ever be a thing (Renting a song is not the same as renting
access to a library of thousands of songs).

~~~
unreal37
Oh you can now. But at what point will that stop? The concept of owning
software is going away. In 5 years, you won't be able to buy Office or
Photoshop. Just rent.

Same for movies and music. Yes, you've always been able to rent them. But in
the future, you won't be able to own them forever.

~~~
nsgi
> Same for movies and music. Yes, you've always been able to rent them. But in
> the future, you won't be able to own them forever.

What makes you say that?

------
bitL
I can't imagine getting rid of files and going all cloud in my creative visual
art projects - just one second of a 14-bit RAW YUV 4:4:4 5k movie takes
gigabytes, even the latest M.2 PCIe SSDs have trouble playing it back
realtime, not mentioning "slow" 1Gbit Internet connection at best, though
definitely not for upload.

I have a feeling we are getting backwards from the efficiency point of view
and am thinking this won't be a sustainable way forward - even in
distributed/parallel algorithms you try to keep locality to improve
performance and save resources, not to transfer everything back and forth via
some middle man just because some business guy came up with some "genial" idea
how to milk money.

Internet companies have a few chances to earn money, subscription being one of
them, but massive push into useless cloud for their particular business cases
like in the case of Adobe CC or Microsoft Office just leaves bad aftertaste.
Also, Dropbox/GDrive don't allow incremental update API calls for 3rd party
apps, which wastes precious upload bandwidth, and in addition end to end
encryption fully controlled by user is not provided which would justify full
uploads. All of this just screams of artificial constraints which do not
benefit anyone, in the long term not even to those companies.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "I can't imagine getting rid of files and going all cloud in my creative
visual art projects - just one second of a 14-bit RAW YUV 4:4:4 5k movie takes
gigabytes, even the latest M.2 PCIe SSDs have trouble playing it back
realtime"

How many people have this or a similar problem though? I would guess that most
people deal with word documents, jpegs, and mp3's on a daily basis and rarely
encounter much else.

~~~
wslh
The "bitL problem" is part of a big industry, so a lot of people/companies
have this problem. We can say that ~100% of the filmmakers should deal with
this all the time.

Probably this is why YC funded companies such as
[http://www.wireover.com/](http://www.wireover.com/)

~~~
bitL
Until transfer over Internet is faster than sending a harddrive via FedEx,
there is not much hope.

You need 4k+ camera for acceptable quality 1080p final result, 16k+ camera for
good 4k, 32k+ for 8k, and this just brings to their knees the most powerful
Intel processors or storage devices, not mentioning network... :-(

------
unreal37
The author starts by tearing down a straw-man. Fred Wilson wasn't predicting
the end of "file systems". He was saying people go to the cloud to consume
content (Netflix, Youtube, Spotify) and go to the cloud to create content
(Google Drive, Office 360, Soundcloud, etc). And they don't need to concern
themselves with files.

Fred Wilson is a smart guy, and knows that even iOS, Android, etc run on file
systems.

I disagree files are dead too. But file systems is clearly not what he was
talking about.

~~~
davidw
He does go on to admit this, more or less, in the article. So Fred Wilson
remains right, and there's not much to see here, IMO.

~~~
unreal37
I agree. But the headline is "Why Fred Wilson is wrong". And the main argument
is not something he said.

~~~
whyleyc
Author here - I tried to keep "on topic" and constrain myself to files, but
you're right I did drift into filesystems too which probably wasn't helpful.

I think the core argument still holds though - which is that some people (Fred
included ?) see files dying out as inevitable, whereas I'm not sure that's
true (for the various reasons I cite).

------
whyleyc
Author here - would love to hear your comments, as I think this is an
interesting area of debate, especially with digital obsolescence waiting to
bite us all.

~~~
informatimago
The main problem is that of data ownership (which implies, having the data
local, and processing it locally).

Subsidiarily, having control over one own data sets, means that you can
process them with various tools, and therefore that those data sets are
independent from the tools. (I'm pointing the finger at you, iOS and Android).

How this data is refered to, organized, and stored is irrelevant.

The classic notions of file, hierachical directory, file systems are very
useful and practical, because they promote full data set ownership and
processability by user controled programs.

Other kinds of systems may provide other notions (such as that of catalogs of
objects, in capability based operating systems). But as long as the user has
control over his own data, and can process it orthogonaly with his own
programs, it doesn't matter much how it's stored.

The problem indeed is when corporations lure users into giving up control of
their data and processing with convenience. Users should be better educated.

[https://my.fsf.org/donate/](https://my.fsf.org/donate/)

Oh, and developer should also try to provide convenience while preserving user
ownership and control.

(Unfortunately, it's very hard to do on platforms like iOS and Android,
notably thru their app stores).

~~~
wtbob
> The main problem is that of data ownership (which implies, having the data
> local, and processing it locally).

I think that your concept of data ownership can be broken down into two
related but independent concepts: access and control. Access means the ability
to read; control means the ability to delete. Right now, if I upload content
to almost any cloud provider I give access and control of my data to that
provider: using G+ gives Google the ability to view every photo I upload, and
to delete them all at a whim.

In a hypothetical cloud provider which enabled me to encrypt data locally,
they would have no access to my data, but would still be able to delete it.

I would actually like the ability to grant control over a copy of my data
without granting access to it; the two should be independent.

I've had a vague idea for some time of system which enabled me to store
encrypted data and share the keys with my friends but not with the storage
provider. There's been some interesting work in indexing encrypted data which
could be pertinent to this, enabling a storage provider to offer search
capability while still being unable to read the data itself.

------
uptown
I found it odd that he used Dropbox as the argument for the death of files.
While Dropbox does enable apps to sync data relatively seamlessly, the vast
majority of Dropbox users I've encountered use it to store individual files or
folders of individual files.

~~~
jacquesm
I wrote this a while ago, and it's too long for a comment here anyway:

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/the+dropbox+endgame](http://jacquesmattheij.com/the+dropbox+endgame)

~~~
uptown
Certainly possible. Comes down to how much control content creators are
willing to give-up, and what partnerships Dropbox forges with software
developers. For example, will Adobe want a user's entire photo library synced
with Dropbox? What's in it for them? How do they handle the transitional
period where some users want that and others don't?

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mark_l_watson
As people have already pointed out, Fred Wilson is mostly talking about an
abstraction layer so most users think about applications, which provide an
interface layer to files they use.

I think that devices with a relatively small amount of SSD storage contribute
to cloud and web service providers getting more control of people's data.
Selective sync in services like OneCloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox allow
users to just keep local copies of files they need in the near future. At
least I do this.

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toksaitov
I think the author is missing the point of the original article. The point was
not that files are going away. It's just that the concept of file is not that
important for the majority in 2014. Non-tech people go to Spotify to listen to
music, open Netflix to watch a movie, work with documents on Google Drive and
our Grannies don't have to learn what a file is to use their phones (for
something more than just calling us).

~~~
zaphar
He didn't miss the point. He says exactly that later in the article. He just
expands on the distinction a bit is all.

------
Kiro
The upward trends for downloading SoundCloud, Netflix and YouTube stuff are
most likely due to their rise in popularity so not sure if it's relevant at
all.

