The blog is very useful.
http://www.semeistvoto.com

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“The average household user of a personal computer doesn’t need anything with many more features that the Palm OS or Microsoft Outlook and probably has far fewer megabytes of documents than he or she has of archived email.”

Depends on what you mean by “document”. I have less than 100 MB of “documents” if you mean word processing documents. But I have well over 6000 digital photos (and that’s a small number of photos for even an amateur photographer). I have nearly 15,000 songs in iTunes, occupying over 90 GB of hard drive space. I just had to buy a new hard drive because I filled up a 200 GB hard drive with captured DV (my music is on a separate hard drive, so the 200 GB is nearly all DV).

How many documents can I create? Easily, by now, over 50K once I include all the references, presentations, emails, images, etc. It’s not that hard, honest.

Hierarchy, especially poly-hierarchy, is an interesting and useful form of metadata (think inheritance and specialization). It’s not for everyone, but it’s very useful. I’ve been disappointed how many search tools ignore the metadata of the containing directory (doing the descendant tree is hard, so I’ll excuse that omission).

Gideon: That would be just like how today’s image management applications work; using set association (cf. http://www.photools.com/imfs_0003.php)

Doesn’t Tiger’s Spotlight feature cover some of the features of Longhorn’s canned search folders? I haven’t really had time to play with all of the features of Spotlight, but it is my understanding that one can create ‘loaders’ for various document types and Spotlight will index the meta-data. That way, you will be able to have a file in multiple ’smart’ folders based on meta-data. Maybe there really is a use for the properties window in MS Apps.

@ Eric: The main problem with folders and files currently (which sometimes makes me go insane) is that most documents don’t fit this or that folder. They belong in more then one. Copy is not reasonable because then they go out of sync, sym-link are not a solution because they break when you move them to another disk…. I really just want tags: Being able to assign a few categories to a file and have this form a folder would be a much beter solution. You can always make it more or less back-ward by tweaking the copy and move behavior. Only the deletion of a folder could be tricky…

No one is mentioning the fact that a hierarchical file system allows one to use the same filename in two different folders (directories). Otherwise you would have the burden of giving each file a unique name.

An earlier comment proposed making filenames optional, but that doesn’t seem like a solution to me. Sure, we don’t name every pencil on our desk, but that is because the pencils are interchangeable. People, cities, streets, pets, and yes, files, are not interchangeable and therefore get names.

Longhorn is far more than 2 years late. The concept of a distributed, searchable file system was proposed for the Cairo project, which was NT 4.0. It was first announced at the professional developers conference in Anahim, 1994. So if Longhorn goes GA next year it will only be 12 years late.

As for the whole need for a versioning file system: the majority of corporate users don’t need it. The technical ones already have one, most likely – CVS, SourceSafe, ClearCase or whatever. The average Word user could probably do without folders entirely and throw everything into one directory. Heck, a lot of them do just that – sometimes because their corporate IT people make them save to a shared drive. It’s no answer.