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WinFS was an attempt at this. It'd be interesting to learn why it was cancelled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

tinus_hn 6y ago
Because it tries to make people work in a way they don’t want to work. People want to organize their files in folders. They don’t want to tag them all with labels or tags and they don’t want to input all that metadata. Perhaps they want to tag a few, and it’s useful to have some autodetected metadata but they don’t want to tag them all and they don’t want a gigantic ‘Untagged files’ list. They want folders and they want more than a flat folder list, they want nested folders. You can implement it, it’s not hard and most modern file systems have all the features you need. But users will hate it and won’t use it the way you want.
- eru 6y ago
  You are right that users don't want to do that busy work. But I am less sure users actually want folders. Some power-users, sure. But most normal people don't want to deal with folders, either. For evidence: look at the guy who saves everything on his overflowing desktop. Any system that allows people to find their stuff, and perhaps make a few annotations, will be good for them. Google Photos is almost a good example: I don't have to do annotate anything, yet I can search for eg pictures of snow or by location. (I say only 'almost', because while impressive, that system isn't good enough yet to find obscure stuff or to work on contextual cues like 'those pictures I took at home after we came back from shopping sometime in the last few months'.)
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    That’s all very nice but a filesystem needs to be able to deal with every type of file on the planet. Which means you can’t automatically detect the contents. And really, a lot of users don’t want an interface that doesn’t allow them to do what they want just because someone else just dumps all their files on the desktop. Apple tried this on iCloud and had to go back. Because, while it makes for nice presentation and usability, there’s a lot of users that it can’t cater for.

tinus_hn 6y ago

Because it tries to make people work in a way they don’t want to work. People want to organize their files in folders. They don’t want to tag them all with labels or tags and they don’t want to input all that metadata. Perhaps they want to tag a few, and it’s useful to have some autodetected metadata but they don’t want to tag them all and they don’t want a gigantic ‘Untagged files’ list. They want folders and they want more than a flat folder list, they want nested folders. You can implement it, it’s not hard and most modern file systems have all the features you need. But users will hate it and won’t use it the way you want.

eru 6y ago
You are right that users don't want to do that busy work. But I am less sure users actually want folders. Some power-users, sure. But most normal people don't want to deal with folders, either. For evidence: look at the guy who saves everything on his overflowing desktop. Any system that allows people to find their stuff, and perhaps make a few annotations, will be good for them. Google Photos is almost a good example: I don't have to do annotate anything, yet I can search for eg pictures of snow or by location. (I say only 'almost', because while impressive, that system isn't good enough yet to find obscure stuff or to work on contextual cues like 'those pictures I took at home after we came back from shopping sometime in the last few months'.)
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  That’s all very nice but a filesystem needs to be able to deal with every type of file on the planet. Which means you can’t automatically detect the contents. And really, a lot of users don’t want an interface that doesn’t allow them to do what they want just because someone else just dumps all their files on the desktop. Apple tried this on iCloud and had to go back. Because, while it makes for nice presentation and usability, there’s a lot of users that it can’t cater for.