I never would have believed that "filesystems are useful and good for organizing information" was a controversial statement until last year when I worked for a company where the CEO insisted that "files and folders are ruining people's minds" and started a very serious push to avoid anyone using a local filesystem in any way.<p>In principle, sure, centralize data management. It's important. I get it. Messy shared filesystems aren't a great way of archiving data. But at the same time, they're a good solution for quickly producing and using data.<p>The context was around specialized desktop application for technical users (desktop GIS). Yes, you can stream data, and yes, database connections are very much a thing, but that doesn't get around the simple fact that the UIs on everything are set up for local file access. Furthermore, the other applications used alongside this also expect (and in many cases, only accept) local files. 90% of the expensive software you're paying for (or the open solutions too) can't talk to that nice fancy internal-only API you set up to "replace filesystems". In practice, folks are going to wind up with local files anyway, which means you wind up with multiple different copies of the data, which was the whole thing you were trying to avoid.<p>Also, users are _mostly_ creating new data and not just consuming existing data. The whole point is to have a gui toolbox for processing data and creating new datasets. At a deep level, that's best solved by local files for this use case. (i.e. the formats you need to use for interoperability are meant to be updated efficiently as local files. You can stream them, but not easily update them.) Yes, it's possible to have centralized data stores, but they often wind up being a SMB/NFS/etc share because you need to open the data in multiple applications and local files _are_ the interoperability standards. Embrace shared filesystems where they make sense. They're not the enemy.<p>Next is hierarchy. Folders are a _great_ system for organizing temporary ad-hoc work. They're also a pretty good system for organizing longer-lived structures. Pushing things into a limited database schema or tagging structure actually makes things harder to find than a "working folder" approach, as it's difficult to group unrelated data together. Sure, you can tag things for grouping, but that generally loses hierarchy. You can reproduce hierarchy with nested tags, but then you're back to representing things as folders. That representation is _useful_ in many cases and isn't a bad thing.<p>In short, filesystems are good for interoperability on the desktop and desktop workflows are still very necessary for many things. Hierarchical organization is useful, and insisting on dropping it comes with a cost. "Shoebox" / no-file solutions are good for some cases, but not for all. Be _very_ careful about trying to force solutions where they don't fit.