Nassim Taleb talks about this a tautology that is reflective of this concept in Antifragile -- basically says that technologies that have been around for "x" years are likely to remain in use for another "x" years. Think about the wheel. Or paper. Or (as cited above) COBOL. Interesting food for thought. I use this when talking to folks who insist that client-side file storage is going away (e.g. "but everything is going to move to the cloud!"). Explicit filenames on the desktop have been around for decades -- and are likely to remain a fundamental part of our system structures for a long time to come (though are likely to be joined by documents stored in the cloud).