Filesystems that abstract away things like directories aren’t new, they just haven’t been commercially successful (I believe Vista was going to include WinFS, w

Filesystems that abstract away things like directories aren’t new, they just haven’t been commercially successful (I believe Vista was going to include WinFS, which was a database-like filesystem, but it was scrapped). It’s not that systems research has suddenly stopped, it’s that it’s really really hard to not only introduce radical ideas to the public, it’s also hard to make sure you don’t break existing billion-dollar systems at the same time. And as anyone who’s had the misfortune of using a network share over a flaky connection can tell you, abstracting files away over networks is tricky business, and when your connection fails (which it will), that abstraction breaks.