Ignores the obvious benefit of the classical filesystem, which is that all data inherits an <i>enormous</i> amount of generic functionality from it: organization, interop, sharing, backup, versioning, etc.<p>File systems don't need to die, they need to grow up and provide the things that apps always have to implement over top of them:<p>- user-centric interface that shows data in a way that makes sense to them: documents, apps, messages, contacts, etc.<p>- non-hiearchal structure, views based on search, filter, sort<p>- database-like performance and semantics e.g. indexes, transactions<p>- structured data that is trivial to load/save from any programming language<p>I believe that all this can be had while preserving the benefits of flat files, but it's an enormously ambitious undertaking and the only sort-of-attempt that I'm aware of (WinFS) never even shipped, let alone caught on.