Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity
The bit about replacing folder hierarchies with tags and search reminds me of some ideas that are actually pretty old now. Back in the &#x27;80s and &#x27;90s, there was a wave of interest in replacing the traditional filesystem with a relational database, for most of the same reasons as outlined here (we can store more files than we can meaningfully organize, hierarchical organization doesn&#x27;t really fit lots of use cases, searching is easier than clicking up and down a hierarchy, etc.).<p>This led to a bunch of different products and almost-products, like Apple&#x27;s &quot;Soups&quot; for the Newton (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Soup_(Apple)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Soup_(Apple)</a>) and Microsoft&#x27;s WinFS (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;WinFS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;WinFS</a>), and the original file system for BeOS (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2008&#x2F;03&#x2F;past-present-future-file-systems&#x2F;7&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2008&#x2F;03&#x2F;past-present-future-...</a>).<p>None of these ever really took off, though. Mostly this was because they ran into unsolvable performance problems. Hardware has come a long way since the mid-&#x27;90s, though, so it&#x27;d be interesting to see if those ideas that were impractical then are practical today.