If anyone wants to make millions in the computer industry, here’s the way to do it: get rid of the file system. Files and folders made sense when we only had a handful of files on a floppy disk. Now, with thousands of files on these giant hard drives, you have to be a particularly conscientious librarian to keep track of everything.
Even more importantly, the thing that new, inexperienced computer users have the most trouble with is files and folders. Anyone who’s done tech support will back me up on this. “Where did my file go?” For people who don’t even understand the difference between computer memory and hard drive space, this can be an almost insurmountable problem.
So what do we do? I don’t know. I for one would like to have a Google-like search function in Open and Save dialog boxes, but this wouldn’t be enough to solve the problem, especially for inexperienced users. We need some new way to organize things that’s visual and understandable.
See, I just point out problems. I don’t solve them. But anyone who figures this out is going to be unimaginably rich.
Yeah – this idea has been broached by many people, notably Alan Cooper in his books. I’m not sure what the solution is either, but some people are working on solutions. See: http://www.scopeware.com/home_ie/index_flashie.htm
How interesting. Because actually, when I was learning computers, the file cabinet idea helped me. But then, I tend to be librarian-oriented, so there may be a reason for that. 🙂