Your point is as strong as this: Lots of people die in car crashes, one day we’re going to replace them with a better vehicle with an engine. The closest one can get to your point is that people don’t save their data, or they otherwise lose it. That has nothing to do with there being files or not – as soon as you delimitate data (which is essential) it’s a file, or an object if you insist on playing with semantics. If you want a better way to find your data, or have it in a permanent robust state, that’s different, and something tech can already resolve. Nothing to do with not having files though.

Media player is a good example. You don’t see song.mp3, sure, you just see a database of songs. That may be a cool way to go for many apps. As soon as you move a song from media player to your usb, you will need to think of the data as a file. It’s very simple. In that sense, the interviewee may have something, but it’s extremely irritating to have it expressed in some kind of sensationalist tabloid speak that clouds the reality rather than elucidates the potential techs of the future. It’s just hot air.

tom: Nice to see somebody remembers the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, even if Apple doesn’t. The original Mac OS interface was a marvel of HCI. Most everything since then has been two steps back for every one forward.

Where’s Jef Raskin when you need him? Oh, he’s dead.

Seriously, as usual MS is 20 years late to the party. Check out archy for the latest iteration of Raskin’s life work on the post-Mac interface.

I know it’s coming, I watch Discovery Channel

What a load of nonsense. Hmm… wheels, why have we stuck with them for so long? – they’re thousands of years old! What could we universally use for a replacement for wheels? Well, we have no idea, but hell, we only used them in the first place because they were strong and went around easily.

Opening a document, terrible! Clicking on it! Very inefficient. The real world is much better. I just have to get up from my desk, walk across the office, open the cabinet, thumb through the folders, pull out the document… then I have it right there… no stupid window around it! A4 size, and I can zoom in by pulling it closer to my face. Plus, it already just exists! If I lay it on the desk, I can see other documents around and under it… oh, wait…

Overlapping windows are just for small screens… nonsense. I have quite a few apps that can be full screened – but I rarely want them to be. You know, it’s useful having some other data on the screen. It’s more convenient to “put a document away” by clicking on an ever-present X than any other conceivable means. Even talking to it is going to be inconvenient a lot of the time. OS’s without windows are nothing new – you highlight cell phones and consoles. If anything they counter his theory – small screens want single views. You can’t handle more than one thing on a phone screen – but on my PC I can have a movie playing in one window, my phone dial on another, and still be surfing the web in another. Yes, I do want all of them on screen at once, and hell, behind them all I even have a movie playing. I can full-screen it instantly when Thora Birch takes her top off. Even on consoles, they also attempt to resolve very simple problems – comparing selecting between a game and a movie pane is hardly comparable to the infinite complexities of a desktop OS. As for 3D cubes…

WinFS has never “got rid of files” – it just exposed the data therein to a unified catalogue of sorts. Sorry, files are a good thing. They’ll never go away. The only alternative is a massive set of data permanently sloshing around in some kind of ocean of memory. Of course, you’d need a means to delaminate it all to know what is what. Name parts of it. Select the bits you want, and only the bits you want. Something to describe what kind of data it is… hmm…

Obviously interfaces will evolve, but the guy’s a fantasist who’s playing with semantics rather than technical innovation, or even being visionary. To really have any credibility, he’s going to have to wait a long time before data is manipulated by thought, viewed on the retina, and is retrieved intuitively from a mass of wet slush.

Disclaimer: Comment tone dictated by article’s merits.

It’d be suicide for Microsoft to change up the formula too much, but seeing all these Win3.1 holdovers even in Vista is really disturbing considering the outrageous price they ask for that software.