Why files need to die

> As we go about our daily lives, we don't open up a file for each of our friends or create folders full of detailed records about our shopping trips.

We don't? I look up my friends in a contact book on my iPhone - each friend's entry is a conceptual "file" in a "contact book" folder.

I keep my shopping receipts - files - in a folder - a drawer in the kitchen. (Okay, I don't, but hypothetically I could.)

If we're talking about documents meant to be shared, that's fair - a simple flat file may not be enough to store everything you want to know about it, you'd want something more akin to a versioning system, or a wiki.

tl;dr: because files are an "old" concept.

Hmm. The QWERTY issue is completely incidental and a total red-herring. And just because something is old doesn't mean it should or needs to be replaced.

Needless to say, no alternative is suggested.

At the end of the day, no matter how we think of or use "packages" of data, they are just that - coherent bits which make up a meaningful whole: whether that's an image, 140 characters of text, a pdf document or whatever. I'm struggling to see how the concept of a "file" can be super-ceded.

A file is a file whether you call it data glob, group of bits, or Beelzebubba.