Are file-systems on the way out?
blogs.gnome.org
blogs.gnome.org
When I helped my sister recover some corrupted email a few years ago, I expected her to be confused by the fact that each file contained an entire folder's worth of email, instead of a single email. She wasn't surprised. How it was stored never crossed her mind. I think that's true of many email users going all the way back to when everyone at my university read their mail using Pine on Unix servers. I don't think most of the English majors and history majors thought about how each email was represented on disk. Furthermore, web mail showed years ago that users are already so disconnected from the question of how their data is stored that they don't even blink when it moves from their hard drive to the internet.
tl;dr The "Huh? What's a file?" train left the station a long, long time ago.
PS/Edit: Come to think of it, how will the UI designer of an email program deal with the lack of a unifying concept for "documents, music, pictures, videos, and downloads?" Will you see an "Attach a document, some music, a picture, a video, or a download" button when you're writing an email? And will users feel all :-/ because they wanted to attach an e-book and there's no button for that?
It's likely that folder hierarchies will be shown the door first. Actually, a lot of people already just save their documents to "My Documents". Then weep when they realize that this is a local folder, and their hard drive crash wiped out all their work, and IT support can only say "Next time put it on the NAS". Some defaults are just stupid.
There is a very simple reason why this is true. Usability researchers have known and repeatedly verified for at least 20 years that regular users simply don't "get" directory trees. They don't understand the idea of directories within directories within directories with files scattered at all levels, and the same file possibly being in multiple places and each copy being potentially different.
We're not talking illiterates. We're talking about college graduates who have used computers for years but simply don't understand this basic concept. And if you try to explain it to them you'll hit a blank wall.
You can know one of these for a long time without noticing this lack of knowledge. They will successfully use files that are in a directory system. But when you dig deeper you realize that they have memorized actions. "I click on this icon, and search for my file." "Wouldn't it be nicer if you organized your files into folders?" "You can put folders into that icon???"
It is a surprise the first time you realize that someone you know, who is not an obvious moron, really doesn't understand the idea of a directory structure. And it is a surreal experience to try to explain it and fail. It is doubly surreal because everyone who actually works with software has to understand this point so you lose track of the fact that some don't. It can be hard to believe that these people exist. But they do and they are in the majority.
This is a huge problem for anyone writing consumer software. It may make your software more flexible, but as soon as you expose the filesystem to regular users, your software is not going to be user friendly. Therefore popular applications like iTunes go out of their way to hide the existence of the filesystem from users.
(And since everyone does that, people have no reason to learn to understand the filesystem, and the cycle repeats...)
But really, are they wrong? With spotlight on my Mac, and Google Desktop on my PC, I can move files to a "files" folder and search away, without all the "uber micro" that some nerds seem to require.
I don't care how many times david pogue says otherwise, it's a lot easier to drag the audio files i want on my mp3 player from one window to another than to wrestle with itunes. Not only is it easier, but it's a skill I can apply again and again and again to lots of different tasks. If you do want to wrestle with some kind of crazy-ass music management system, the way that seems to work best to make it so that we can all use whatever we want is to have an underlying interface based on files.
Beyond interoperability, tech that's too specific to 'what people actually use their computers for' tends to make it harder to do things that the developers didn't think of; go far enough down that road and computers become about as interesting as TVs.
This perfectly summarizes Apple's post-2007 business model.
Stallman's response seems to be just not to use it, to keep your own data locally and manage everything yourself, lest you forfeit control. Yet, Ubuntu created their own version of cloud services branded Ubuntu One.
I feel that one vision might be to provide a very low power, high storage always-on home server solution to users with all kinds of integration and synced as a personal cloud. I'm opposed to keeping my computer running 24/7 due to the huge waste of energy (I'm in Europe, energy is expensive), but I would happily use a couple of watts for a personal cloud device (or internet-enabled NAS).
As long as you pick a good data model, syncing should be simple (famous last words).
I can e-mail you my Master's Thesis, which covers some of the theory behind it (although, it's in Swedish).
I mean, with services like FIOS that offer upstream parity, I think this is a pretty appealing idea. There are some interesting points in the comments on that link, too.
So actually getting devices to call home to the “personal cloud” seems like it would be harder to make happen, and more importantly, harder to make reliable, because you can't use economic power to force at least one side to act in a convenient manner. This would drain the life out of any attempt at “you don't have to think about it very much”.
The link has a more interesting (and not so black and white) discussion about files, abstraction, and the cloud.
You can still ride horses (and for good reasons!). Doesn’t mean that horses are not out.
I don’t know how many users of computing devices there are in the world but I’m fairly certain that you would use billion in a description of them.
Are user-visible and user-manipulable file-systems on the way out?
While the quick-search functionality of modern OSs is awesome, being able to arrange things in a hierarchy in the filesystem is also very useful. I guess the OS could go in the direction of tagging, but that seems pretty messy (I'm frightened to think of what would happen to our consulting firm's neatly organized and huge DropBox).
I'm not sure how well it scales.
I do think that simple trees don't work well (and history argues for this: even early versions of Unix had links). A multigraph would be nice, though tough to delete from.
... and in fact in many ways we already have multigraphs on filesystems, programmers already don't understand them nearly as well as they think they do, they are often nothing but trouble, and we don't see extensive use made of them in very "graphy" ways as a result.
The point is to reduce complexity for the end user. Think about Google Docs for a minute. I don't know if they are storing all my docs in a database or in a filesystem and it doesn't matter. I can still get to them right? When I download them on my Mac, they are on a filesystem that I can see.
End users (think parents, grandparents, etc.) should not have sysadmin their own machines. Removing the whole user visible filesystem is a step in that direction. Google gets this, Apple gets this, nerds don't.
People pay for convenience, not features. Dropping the user visible filesystem is convenient for the majority and that will make Apple money.
That's file centric thinking. Most normal people don't think about files, they think about apps and the data that's in them. iTunes holds my music, Word holds my documents, Excel has my spreedsheets; that's how people think when they don't grok files.
A majority of people are significantly helped by this strategy, not hurt.