

The Death of File Systems by Jakob Nielsen, February 1996 - dejan
http://www.useit.com/papers/filedeath.html

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qaexl
My first thought reading the article was that his prediction in 1996 was
wrong. Then I realized that most of my work now is on desktops, specifically
related to development work on the command line. That's not a mainstream use-
case. I build web applications ... and people who use the apps I build don't
care about the underlying filesystem storage. They are interacting with a SQL
database.

When I go into my Gmail account, I have filters set to label my email. I don't
use folders there. Half of the documents I care about are on Google Docs,
where I use search instead of a file browser. I don't use a filesystem
metaphor on my non-jail-broken iPod Touch either, except maybe to access the
apps.

With mobile web apps set to explode in 2011 -- Android is predicted to go to
sub-$100 retail price, it means a lot of people's first experience of a
personal computing device will not be a filesystem.

