This discussion reminds me of non-technical users. They will tolerate incredible sluggishness. It is amazing what Oracle and the free alternatives get away with. People, including engineers/developers, not only tolerate sluggishness but when something actually works on the first try they think it's amazing.
I've witnessed this tolerance for mediocrity for years and it still continues to blow my mind.
I have wondered how people discover Dropbox. It seems to have penetration into the realm of non-techies, but I am not sure. Is this true, in your opinion?
The iPad I completely understand the appeal. It does not look like a computer. It looks like an Etch-a-Sketch. It's basically a handheld game.
I would love to read more about what your users want. It is interesting and educational.
I agree this trend the investor posited to pg is a good one. It will force startups to focus on profits not hype and VC.
That will make for better startups that can perhaps become longlasting companies.
Facebook is all hype. That is not the formula for a longlasting company. As long as the hype is high, they are in good shape. How long does hype last? Our society is more deficient in sustained attention than ever thanks to the internet. Facebook needs to acquire any Facebook alternatives early and often. People are more than ready for the next new thing.
There is no value in data itself. You have to do something with it to produce income. You need a plan. Facebook lacks a plan. Facebook will stand as a good historical example for those who wantonly collect personal data and dream of its value. The amount of personal data Facebook has collected is unparalled. But that does not magicaly create a business. Unless the business is cold calling or some similarly annoying tactic to generate sales.
Facebook's business is running on hype, not data. If the hype slows. It traffic dies down, it's game over.
The idea that the sucess of Facebook is just a matter of flipping the switch and asking Facebook's users to buy things is unsupported by any evidence. However we have the dot com bubble as an example that just acquiring users without a solid business plan is not enough. Grow big, fast, is not enough. Facebook dreamers still think it is.
As investors see that the general public understands that Facebook has no plan, as reflected in the media, and that only have lots of users and personal data, investors will be more cautious. Investors read newspapers. And they believe what they read.
The hype wears off. People see that these companies are smoke and mirrors. And suddenly you can't pull another Groupon so easily.
This is the smart approach. Keep everything as "format agnostic" as possible.
The only reason someone would not use this approach and opt for one of the services mentioned is marketing. There is no marketing for storing files in a "non-proprietary" format.
It's simply a matter of not knowing how to do it.
What's funny is the proprietary approaches ultimately can make things more difficult for novices. At least it's more they have to learn: different rules for each service. How often I have heard novices wanting to know how to convert/export/transfer files to/from these services.
Compare this with learning the jpeg format, IPTC and EXIF. You only need to learn one set of rules. And every service uses jpeg. That's unlikely to change anytime soon.
It's a battle against the "lowest common denominator" in the interest of creating a strategic advantage via incompatibility and proprietary formats. But it seems always some compromise is necessary. All those services work with lowest common denominator formats like jpeg. They don't each have their own proprietary image formats, though they could. Compromise is made.
The entire web is built on "lowest common denominators": e.g., IP, UDP, TCP. To allow things to flourish you have to have some lowest common denominators that everyone can develop on top of. But let the battle continue. We the users all suffer inconvenience as a result.
What the "pros" use today is what the "peons", in one form or another, will use tomorrow.
Apple has to run to stand still.
They will continually have to make accomodations to address what the "free" computer users are doing. "Free" meaning not bound by Apple's rules.
If a "pro" can get all his devices, not necessarily all made by Apple, to communicate with each other, and he can move data between them effortlessly, the "peons" are going to take notice.
My main issue with the file system is hierarchy. I hate typing paths. Even if it's point and click, paths are still a nuisance. They require too much thinking. And to ask a novice to deal with paths, and having all these things in various locations, is I think unreasonable.
Apple once had a flat filesystem.
It seems crude but it's very fast. And it's simple. A list. Our minds can handle that with little trouble.
I actually try to make my filesystem as flat as possible. This allows me to glob for things. This is much faster than something more complex like using find or precalculated indices (e.g. codesearch).
It's not full on regex so it's something I could teach to a novice. I have some short scripts I wrote for locating files or lists of files and saving the path as a shell variable ("v"). Then you just do
app $v
Simple.
And the other thing, which Google has reminded us, is that to work with "big data" you may find you must transcend the limits of the filesystem. The way to do that is to simplify.
So to me the way forward is greater simplicity. But certainly not in the Steve Jobs Apple "lock down" sense. Where you can't get at the data unless you're using whatever Apple wants you to use. Where Apple devices cannot connect with non-Apple ones. Totally inflexible. And an unreasonable trade-off in exchange for whatever interface du jour Apple is offering.