> Folders were a great metaphor when our files were a handful of office documents. But today, complex hierachies make it hard to organize and find what we are looking for. The concept of a file being located in a single place seems outdated. Content is stored, synced, backed up and shared among many different devices. And our most important content lives in services or apps, not in folders and files. While mobile devices are trying to kill file management completely, it’s more important today than ever. With the enormous amount and complexity of content, we need a new solution.
Okay, buddy. Tell me how you're going to navigate a complex project built with multiple apps with your cool new tag-only scheme.
How would you re-organize the myriad number of source code files, library sources, images, image source files, readmes, and other things? Hierarchical structures are good for that kind of thing. If you're going to advocate throwing them out then I think it is imperative for you to tell me how you will organize real projects rather than just a handwave about search and adding tags to tags. How would I reorganize the directory full of 193 Illustrator art files and a ton of subdirectories, many with multiple layers of their own subdirectories, that make up the graphic novel I finished last year? It's got a total of ~2.7k files in it but all of that complexity is hidden behind a bunch of subdirectories so I can quickly find what I need at any moment.
(And also: holy crap those sample images are so much WHITE, using this will be like staring into a spotlight. And so impersonal - the user-set desktop picture is a wonderful thing that makes the computer feel like it's theirs and I kinda feel like this proposal completely drops affordances like that in favor of a blown-up iPad UI.)