Remember the "Information at your fingertips" speeches of Bill Gates (Comtex '90 and '94) and the Cairo operating system, its ObjectFS filesystem and later WinFS?
* Information at your fingertips Bill Gates Comdex Keynote 1995: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0O0Xjpjvfc
* Information at your fingertips Bill Gates Comdex Keynote 1990: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxUPSF2K7Cs
* Microsoft's Cairo operating system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)
* Bill Gates' The Road Ahead book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book...
* WinFS and its history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
The current operating systems haven't really advanced since Windows 95 - the user interface and the development APIs (not the kernel mode part). Some mobile OS are even a regression. The idea of compound documents format was not bad, just OLE2 was cumbersome (and a vendor lock-in). With HTML, its IFRAME and HTML-based desktop GUI we could achieve the paradigm shift that Bill envisioned.