It's a silly question. Is he suggesting computers will not have filesystems? No. He's saying users will not interact directly with files. Instead they will

It's a silly question. Is he suggesting computers will not have filesystems? No. He's saying users will not interact directly with files. Instead they will interact with "documents, music, pictures, videos, and downloads" without seeing them as files. Big deal. That's what desktop GUIs have been working toward ever since they started hiding file extensions, and they've succeeded to the point where many users don't understand that a song is probably a file on disk somewhere. My mother, among other people, noticed the change from consistent use of the word "file" to consistent use of the word "document" and thought it meant there was an important difference between the two. I've had to explain to her several times that even though Word calls her letter a "document" it is still stored in a file that she can attach to an e-mail, burn onto a CD, and do all the other things she knows how to do with a file. When I helped my sister recover some corrupted email a few years ago, I expected her to be confused by the fact that each file contained an entire folder's worth of email, instead of a single email. She wasn't surprised. How it was stored never crossed her mind. I think that's true of many email users going all the way back to when everyone at my university read their mail using Pine on Unix servers. I don't think most of the English majors and history majors thought about how each email was represented on disk. Furthermore, web mail showed years ago that users are already so disconnected from the question of how their data is stored that they don't even blink when it moves from their hard drive to the internet. tl;dr The "Huh? What's a file?" train left the station a long, long time ago. PS/Edit: Come to think of it, how will the UI designer of an email program deal with the lack of a unifying concept for "documents, music, pictures, videos, and downloads?" Will you see an "Attach a document, some music, a picture, a video, or a download" button when you're writing an email? And will users feel all :-/ because they wanted to attach an e-book and there's no button for that?