The Death of File Systems by Jakob Nielsen, February 1996

My first thought reading the article was that his prediction in 1996 was wrong. Then I realized that most of my work now is on desktops, specifically related to development work on the command line. That's not a mainstream use-case. I build web applications ... and people who use the apps I build don't care about the underlying filesystem storage. They are interacting with a SQL database.

When I go into my Gmail account, I have filters set to label my email. I don't use folders there. Half of the documents I care about are on Google Docs, where I use search instead of a file browser. I don't use a filesystem metaphor on my non-jail-broken iPod Touch either, except maybe to access the apps.

With mobile web apps set to explode in 2011 -- Android is predicted to go to sub-$100 retail price, it means a lot of people's first experience of a personal computing device will not be a filesystem.