Someone who doesn't understand what he's talking about telling everyone that we don't need X because the future is the cloud and the cloud is just so different.<p>Yup... another day on HN.
If files could package and pass around metadata in the same way they pass around data, I might agree with Dare's conclusion. However, for me, metadata is becoming too important and has destroyed the utility of files (and pure data) being truly useful.<p>Example: Photos. The file is the photo. However, think of all the things besides that: face tags, text tags, album, ratings, etc. If you've ever tried to import 5GB of photos from iPhoto to Picasa (or vice-versa) you'll understand what I mean.<p>This is why "stuff in the cloud" is so useful: API support is there from day 1 so that you always know what CAN be exported and how.
It seems to me that any system or API you imagine or make up that associates a particular stream of bits with some sort of identifier is pretty much a file system.
Files will never go away. It all depends on the abstraction level that you view the term 'file'. Humans are files, a self contained unit of information (with built in copy semantics!) they have meta data (hair color, eye color, height, age etc). My point is that there will always be a container object of a sequence of bytes of data. Whether that's an mp3 file or a hummingbird, they are still files.<p>A more meaningful question might be to challenge the notion of a hierarchical file system. The web has managed fine without one, so possibly search across a flat collection is a better metaphor. There are numerous others.<p>There are, however, interesting possibilities that make files less conspicuous, apple are experimenting with this, where there are pipes between apps, I open a photo, send it to snapseed, pipe it on to tumblr. At no point am I confronted with a file save dialog. Obviously it's a file under the covers, but that's just an abstraction. Files themselves are abstractions. There's really no such thing as an mp3 file, it's just a sequence of bytes we can interpret as one.