> Computers are seldom privately owned – they are considered essentially communal rather than personal
This struck me as true of most people's use of computers now. Almost everyone I know who isn't either an old fashioned developer or a gamer uses a mobile phone or tablet merely as a graphical terminal; the actual computer is some mysterious entity elsewhere on the Net.
The golden age of computing when 'everyone' had one of their own that was useable offline is now long past.
Likewise Gen Z and Alpha are not very technical. Many teens and 20 somethings have a hard time with seemingly basic tasks like finding files. As a 20 something myself, my public school did not offer any 'technical' courses beyond office programs and keyboarding.
Files and folders are based on a metaphor applying to paper-based organizational systems. People used to have typewriter printouts that they used to mark up by pen and place into folders, then file away into filing cabinets. Is there really a need for a filesystem other than in the vestiges of what we consider an operating system?
The "files and folders" metaphor never worked even in the heyday of computer literacy, most people never understood it and just dumped all their crap on the desktop.
Seeing as the metaphor did not, does not, and will not work it is only reasonable that personal computing is slowly moving away from it and towards something the users actually want: One singular place to store everything (and I mean everything) and a one-stop quick way to find something in there, organization be damned.
Email is perhaps one of the earliest manifestations of this user desire: Everything goes in the one singular Inbox, and you search for whatever mail you need.
> a one-stop quick way to find something in there, organization be damned.
I understand the desire, and clever search indexing allegedly solves this, but it's fundamentally an impossible tradeoff. Organization is essential to finding things.
I'm tired of people pretending search and AI can solve that problem. It can help, but it can't tell you what x or y thing you want is. I find myself typing nonsense like "what's the thing that's important in speaking" if I watched a video about how to give a good talk and am wanting to watch a part of it again. I haven't given it a title relative to how I think about it, I haven't thought about how to categorize it, and I haven't let a "place" for it settle in my head, because I didn't bookmark it or add it to a playlist.
My point exactly. The people who cry that the young today can't file-and-folder fail to understand bloody nobody, neither young nor old, cares for file-and-folder.
>And folders are a very simple concept. If you can't handle them on a system that uses them, that's bad.
Simple to us. I've seen accountants, aka people who deal with files and folders as a matter of their god damn line of work, fail to understand or care for files and folders in computers. They still put everything on the desktop.
Fact of the matter is people do not care for files-and-folders. It's high time we admit most people do not want it, do not care for it, and just want to store everything in one place with an easy one-stop way to find what they want. Most people don't care about file systems, and both iOS and Android are right for abstracting away something nobody cares about.
>Putting things on the desktop or not caring for folders is different from not understanding the concept.
Yes, but whether they understand or not they still clearly don't care.
>That's a pipe dream. If you want good search results, then you need to put in organizational effort.
The thing is people will not put in effort, whether out of neglect or ignorance. "It's in the 'puter." is as far as most people will care, and operating environments that respect this attitude end up having the widest mainstream appeal and adoption.
It's like manual and automatic transmission in cars. Most people drive their cars to get from A to B, they couldn't give a flying banana how it works. The enthusiasts arguing over stick shift are martians, the people just want a bloody car to get them where they want to be and car manufacturers will and should oblige the people.
Automatic transmissions actually do a good and thorough job. File search, if the user hasn't done any sorting at all, will fail a lot. That's why it's a pipe dream. People can always refuse to sort but they won't get the experience they want.
Yeah, and that something for most people is the search box.
For another example of this "I refuse to file-and-folder" phenomenon, try and recount how many people go to Amazon by going to the address bar, typing www.amazon.com, and hitting enter instead of going to Google, searching Amazon, and clicking the first listing.
Fact of the matter is people don't fucking care for file-and-folder, people don't fucking care for locators. For most people, a given something is "in the computer" and that is as far as they can be bothered to care. Abstractioning of file systems and similar constructs to improve end-user usability is the correct decision, given this situation.
Yes, the small handful of us that understand and use file-and-folder and Universal Resource Locators hate the abstraction, but we are Nobody. They (most people) are Everyone.
The Photos app dumping all photos into one singular location with no hints as to where it's located in the file system is better usability for everyone. That's the brutal-to-nerds reality.
Each generation consists of roughly 90% of people who are completely clueless about anything computer related. Those of us that work in the field usually can't even conceive of it but it's true.
Indeed, you could say the same about cars and plumbing too (with some variation in %). People tend to think younger people are automatically 'good at computers' though.
I wouldn't say it's "long past", but rather in its last gasps outside of niche hobbyist communities. There are plenty of people whose primary computer use is still local, they're just considered old-fashioned
This struck me as true of most people's use of computers now. Almost everyone I know who isn't either an old fashioned developer or a gamer uses a mobile phone or tablet merely as a graphical terminal; the actual computer is some mysterious entity elsewhere on the Net.
The golden age of computing when 'everyone' had one of their own that was useable offline is now long past.