The commoditization (sp?) of <i>your</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So when VCs start trumpeting the 'end of files' make sure you realize what you're giving up.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Fred Wilson is a smart guy, and knows that even iOS, Android, etc run on file systems.<p>I disagree files are dead too. But file systems is clearly not what he was talking about.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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).
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.