Why does the New menu even exist for creating new empty files?
&gt; <i>You still need a BMP editor to put anything meaningful in there. The same is true for a PowerPoint presentation, and an Access database. Although, creating an empty Access database and then opening it will presumably get you the Access program. But if I want to create a new PowerPoint presentation, I will… um… open PowerPoint</i><p>I think that really highlights the paradigm-shift that happened in UX in the last decade - what you could call &quot;documents-centric&quot; vs &quot;application-centric&quot;.<p>Until recently, UI was centered around files. You used programs to edit and manage those files, but the programs didn&#x27;t &quot;own&quot; the files: A file was generally independent of the programs that are used to open them. On the other side, a program does not &quot;know&quot; about a file until you explicitly prompt the program to open the file.<p>Compare that to the &quot;application-centric&quot; paradigm that dominates on the web, in mobile OSes and recently in desktop OSes as well: Here a program &quot;owns&quot; its data and you are supposed to interact with the data <i>only</i> through the program. It&#x27;s an implementation detail how the data is physically stored - but from the user&#x27;s PoV, there is no unified file system. Instead, the assets managed by each program are living in separate universes.