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Wow. In this entire thread, discussing the potential elimination of the most important empowerment computers can provide the individual, the word 'political' does not occur even once!

That most important empowerment? The ability to consciously organize, archive, categorize, and OWN information, entirely under the control of the individual. This is an intensely political capability.

Yet no one here sees this push (which it is, and has been going on for many years) to remove hierarchical filesystems from the reach of average users, as politically motivated? You all *seriously* think this is just some accidental and ill-advised conceptual mistake? Some kind of UI fad, that will go away once the CEOs and 'technology directors' at Apple and Microsoft come to their senses?
Or apparently, a few of you agree with the author, that the worst case is that the anti-file-system push is possibly profit motivated. Closed systems, proprietary data formats, in little App-islands, is just for more profit? Because giant corporations, with all their political connections and ideological agendas, never do anything for *power*, only for money?

Seriously?

The terms 'DRM' and 'copyright' also don't appear in this thread so far. So none of you seem to be even aware of how the powers that be use the DRM/copyright fake issue as a lever to screw down controls on free exchange of information. Which directly relates to the file system issue, since you can't easily exchange things you can't easily locate, group, hold and manipulate.

I say 'fake issue' since the very same business entities who've been screaming about 'content piracy' for years and how something must be done about it (eg MS's Longhorn etc), turned out to have been behind the development and free distribution of most file sharing software. They created the problem, AS THEY INTENDED.

Problem, reaction, solution; the Hegelian Dialectic. To achieve an objective that would be unpopular, first manufacture a 'crisis' to which there is only one apparent solution - what you wanted in the first place. This is how politics has always worked, and probably always will.
The people who would control us all are very good at it.

For quite some time, they've been pretending that 'hierarchical file systems' are really a handicap to users, and we'd all be better off if the major computer OSs presented no such capability to the user.
It's a deceitful lie. What they really want, is take way the user's ability to accumulate, organize and manipulate large volumes of complex information.

Because a computer is an extension of the mind. And the last thing TPTB want, is for the public's mind to be greatly extended. In fact they find the public's awakening cognitive power very uncomfortable, and would like to give it a hierarchical filesystem lobotomy.

Incidentally I do think there are more capable ways to deal with data than the traditional folders & file tree structure. But that's another story, for the future.