It's a silly question. Is he suggesting computers will not have filesystems? No. He's saying users will not interact directly with files. Instead they will interact with "documents, music, pictures, videos, and downloads" without seeing them as files. Big deal. That's what desktop GUIs have been working toward ever since they started hiding file extensions, and they've succeeded to the point where many users don't understand that a song is probably a file on disk somewhere. My mother, among other people, noticed the change from consistent use of the word "file" to consistent use of the word "document" and thought it meant there was an important difference between the two. I've had to explain to her several times that even though Word calls her letter a "document" it is still stored in a file that she can attach to an e-mail, burn onto a CD, and do all the other things she knows how to do with a file.<p>When I helped my sister recover some corrupted email a few years ago, I expected her to be confused by the fact that each file contained an entire folder's worth of email, instead of a single email. She wasn't surprised. How it was stored never crossed her mind. I think that's true of many email users going all the way back to when everyone at my university read their mail using Pine on Unix servers. I don't think most of the English majors and history majors thought about how each email was represented on disk. Furthermore, web mail showed years ago that users are already so disconnected from the question of how their data is stored that they don't even blink when it moves from their hard drive to the internet.<p>tl;dr The "Huh? What's a file?" train left the station a long, long time ago.<p>PS/Edit: Come to think of it, how will the UI designer of an email program deal with the lack of a unifying concept for "documents, music, pictures, videos, and downloads?" Will you see an "Attach a document, some music, a picture, a video, or a download" button when you're writing an email? And will users feel all :-/ because they wanted to attach an e-book and there's no button for that?
I couldn't get the article, and finally I went to <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2011/06/08/new-pony/&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=Md4&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&biw=989&bih=703&strip=1" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.g...</a> for Google's text-only cached version.<p>There is a very simple reason why this is true. Usability researchers have known and repeatedly verified for at least 20 years that regular users simply don't "get" directory trees. They don't understand the idea of directories within directories within directories with files scattered at all levels, and the same file possibly being in multiple places and each copy being potentially different.<p>We're not talking illiterates. We're talking about college graduates who have used computers for years but simply don't understand this basic concept. And if you try to explain it to them you'll hit a blank wall.<p>You can know one of these for a long time without noticing this lack of knowledge. They will successfully use files that are in a directory system. But when you dig deeper you realize that they have memorized actions. "I click on this icon, and search for my file." "Wouldn't it be nicer if you organized your files into folders?" "You can <i>put</i> folders into that icon???"<p>It is a surprise the first time you realize that someone you know, who is not an obvious moron, really doesn't understand the idea of a directory structure. And it is a surreal experience to try to explain it and fail. It is doubly surreal because everyone who actually works with software has to understand this point so you lose track of the fact that some don't. It can be hard to believe that these people exist. But they do and they are in the majority.<p>This is a huge problem for anyone writing consumer software. It may make your software more flexible, but as soon as you expose the filesystem to regular users, your software is not going to be user friendly. Therefore popular applications like iTunes go out of their way to hide the existence of the filesystem from users.<p>(And since everyone does that, people have no reason to learn to understand the filesystem, and the cycle repeats...)
Files are important because they act as an interface (in the OO sense) to all of the different things that the author of this article talks about. The universality of that interface is, for now, key to interoperability.<p>I don't care how many times david pogue says otherwise, it's a lot easier to drag the audio files i want on my mp3 player from one window to another than to wrestle with itunes. Not only is it easier, but it's a skill I can apply again and again and again to lots of different tasks. If you do want to wrestle with some kind of crazy-ass music management system, the way that seems to work best to make it so that we can all use whatever we want is to have an underlying interface based on files.<p>Beyond interoperability, tech that's too specific to 'what people actually use their computers for' tends to make it harder to do things that the developers didn't think of; go far enough down that road and computers become about as interesting as TVs.
Near the end the author asks a very pertinent question indeed: how should the free software community respond to the cloud?<p>Stallman's response seems to be just not to use it, to keep your own data locally and manage everything yourself, lest you forfeit control. Yet, Ubuntu created their own version of cloud services branded Ubuntu One.<p>I feel that one vision might be to provide a very low power, high storage always-on home server solution to users with all kinds of integration and synced as a personal cloud. I'm opposed to keeping my computer running 24/7 due to the huge waste of energy (I'm in Europe, energy is expensive), but I would happily use a couple of watts for a personal cloud device (or internet-enabled NAS).
This reminds me of the feeling some had in the mid 1990s that command line interaction is on the way out, that <i>everything</i> would be GUI based. The answer is, um, no.<p>The link has a more interesting (and not so black and white) discussion about files, abstraction, and the cloud.
What's old is new again... I'm sure other filesystems reflected this no-visible-filesystem OS mentality, but BFS of BeOS was the earliest one I recall (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_File_System</a>) that had metadata, indexing and querying built into the filesystem itself. Apple seems to be making a push to bury the view of the filesystem.<p>While the quick-search functionality of modern OSs is awesome, being able to arrange things in a hierarchy in the filesystem is also very useful. I guess the OS could go in the direction of tagging, but that seems pretty messy (I'm frightened to think of what would happen to our consulting firm's neatly organized and huge DropBox).
Filesystems are NOT on the way out. User-visible filesystems are. iOS has file systems. iCloud will still store the files as files on your Mac/PC.<p>The point is to reduce complexity for the end user. Think about Google Docs for a minute. I don't know if they are storing all my docs in a database or in a filesystem and it doesn't matter. I can still get to them right? When I download them on my Mac, they are on a filesystem that I can see.<p>End users (think parents, grandparents, etc.) should not have sysadmin their own machines. Removing the whole user visible filesystem is a step in that direction. Google gets this, Apple gets this, nerds don't.<p>People pay for convenience, not features. Dropping the user visible filesystem is convenient for the majority and that will make Apple money.
Until there are ways to transmit documents from person to person, without a middle man, with offline hardware in-between, file systems will continue to exist.
What people seem to forget while talking about how awesome iCloud is, is the fact that iCloud is only offering 5G of storage for free.
It is cool and hype to have access to your data from everywhere, but this will unpersonnalize the computer. Since all you care about is your data. Your data is your computer. with iCloud, welcome to the era of the unpersonal computers, where a computer has nothing to do with it's user, except being, well, like a cable to connect to the cloud. An empty cable that a lot of people can use, but nobody really owns it.
What I think people should do, if they are against this path, is to build a system where you can install a personal cloud, using an external hard drive. And be able to sync, automatically, all your data with all your devices. It is way cheaper to buy a hard drive than to buy storage on the cloud. Build your own iCloud.