The article just felt...unjustifiably alarmist to me.
Most non-technical people I know cannot manage files even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept.
For example, Google or Apple is processing the crap out of your email attachment image because they know you don’t understand the idea that trying to send five 10MB photos likely will not fit in an email. All you want to do is send your photos to Grandma. So instead your iDevice handles it for you and either compresses them or throws them in a temporary cloud storage location with a link. Grandma gets her photos - for most people the alternative is a confusing mail delivery bounce followed by frustration.
Apple added Stacks to the desktop because everyone’s tired of seeing other people’s computers with a mess of icons smashed together on the desktop, because that’s the only place files could be conceivably stored in the mind of a non-technical user. The whole idea of a file hierarchy seems either too confusing or too labor intensive to that type of user.
Nerds like us always have and had options. We are aware and capable of coming up with a more friendly solution to us, like a home built NAS or Synology box; ask a non-technical user what those are and be met with a blank stare.
For most people, they really should be paying someone else to maintain their data, iCloud, Google or whatever. Nobody’s home back up scheme can match what these companies are doing in their data centers. And no, these services don’t just delete your data immediately after your monthly payment method bounces - you are given time and nags to download your data or renew, often your data just becomes download-only.
Are we annoyed that most options are not for us, or have to be in a form of a workaround to a technology stack that’s marketed to non-technical people? Maybe. It would be wonderful if there was a device as nice as an iPad that also gave us full access like a Linux PC.
But also, nobody’s forcing us in 2019 to stop using our files as we did in 1999. We didn’t have all these services back then. File management was the option. It is still an option.
And in 2019, Apple finally adds mass storage support to the iPad. Sometimes things come around.
20 years ago, I thought that learning the basics of a filesystem would be a staple of education. I painstakingly taught this to my non-technical relatives. It wasn't that hard. I just assumed that this stuff would start getting taught in public schools.
Instead, we've been struggling (and often failing) to dumb computers down. The fact that people still struggle with the same tasks is a testament to that.
I have lost track of the number of people who have lost precious pictures or documents because they don't understand what device they are stored on, and threw away their old iPad. By focusing on the most common case "emailing photos to grandma" we end up introducing all sorts of new problems.
Just to go into a bit more detail: 1) An auntie thought that dragging 100GB of music into her Dropbox meant that she could just leave on a trip and access her music, without having to wait for it to sync. 2) An uncle didn't know how to access his late wife's photos from her iPad. Which cloud were they in? Were they only on her locked iPad? Who knows! 3) People making public YouTube videos to share private moments with family. (Pedos exploit this to find videos of children bathing)
Have we really improved things? I find these new file abstractions we have created to be much more confusing.
Old people understand the concept of physical media just fine. They know what a record or a roll of film is. And because of this phobia about educating users, we hide so much that they don't even know if their data has been synced, or if it is private.
> Have we really improved things? I find these new file abstractions we have created to be much more confusing.
We haven't, and here's why: a file system was one abstraction. A simple one, that made sense, and wasn't very far detached from actual implementation details. Which meant that weird black magic almost never leaked from underneath.
What we have now, with the cloud and dumbed down software, is many mutually inconsistent and sometimes incompatible abstractions, all completely detached from the reality behind them, which means they have inconsistent corner cases that make no sense unless you know enough about software to be able to imagine what those abstractions are backed by.
In the best tradition of commerce, we've helped people avoid having to learn a simple concept by introducing them to lots of "simplifying" lies.
Rings very true. The alarmist views expressed in the article sound like the tale we have been hearing for the past 1-2 decades that desktops and powerful computers are going away, and everything is going to be in the cloud, everyone is going to use thin clients to access everything. It's 2019, where are all the thin clients? I mean I know they exist, but they are not anywhere near becoming "the main way the computing is done".
> Most non-technical people I know cannot manage files even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept.
You have met my mother I see. She still uses her multi-function printer like a copier because she's never quite grasped the idea that she can store her document scans on her computer.
Most non-technical people I know cannot manage files even after decades of computing experience. I understand why many services try to abstract or simplify the concept.
For example, Google or Apple is processing the crap out of your email attachment image because they know you don’t understand the idea that trying to send five 10MB photos likely will not fit in an email. All you want to do is send your photos to Grandma. So instead your iDevice handles it for you and either compresses them or throws them in a temporary cloud storage location with a link. Grandma gets her photos - for most people the alternative is a confusing mail delivery bounce followed by frustration.
Apple added Stacks to the desktop because everyone’s tired of seeing other people’s computers with a mess of icons smashed together on the desktop, because that’s the only place files could be conceivably stored in the mind of a non-technical user. The whole idea of a file hierarchy seems either too confusing or too labor intensive to that type of user.
Nerds like us always have and had options. We are aware and capable of coming up with a more friendly solution to us, like a home built NAS or Synology box; ask a non-technical user what those are and be met with a blank stare.
For most people, they really should be paying someone else to maintain their data, iCloud, Google or whatever. Nobody’s home back up scheme can match what these companies are doing in their data centers. And no, these services don’t just delete your data immediately after your monthly payment method bounces - you are given time and nags to download your data or renew, often your data just becomes download-only.
Are we annoyed that most options are not for us, or have to be in a form of a workaround to a technology stack that’s marketed to non-technical people? Maybe. It would be wonderful if there was a device as nice as an iPad that also gave us full access like a Linux PC.
But also, nobody’s forcing us in 2019 to stop using our files as we did in 1999. We didn’t have all these services back then. File management was the option. It is still an option.
And in 2019, Apple finally adds mass storage support to the iPad. Sometimes things come around.