> File cabinets are an obvious example. Public libraries are another. Hmm I guess I didn't use clear terminology. File cabinets aren't recursive because you ca

> File cabinets are an obvious example. Public libraries are another. Hmm I guess I didn't use clear terminology. File cabinets aren't recursive because you can't literally put folders within folders within folders. I mean you can try but it's going to get pretty disastrous fast and most don't people don't use them that way. Likewise, the nesting scheme used by libraries isn't recursive. There's: Library > Shelf > Book. That's it. You can't have books that contain other books, or shelves that contain other shelves. You're right that family trees, corporate org chats etc are examples of recursive structures that don't cause people problems though. > The people want computers that are simple and intuitive to use, power be damned because they can't and won't use that power anyway ... Windows and Linux still exist for the enthusiasts and professionals Right ... putting enthusiasts to one side, my point is that "professionals" is a massive and very important category of people. Practically any office worker is going to be a professional of some kind or another. So they can and will use that power once they graduate beyond mere consumption and start needing to organize complex projects involving many types of data, work with that data in different kinds of apps and so on. Yes you can try and make it all happen using only search and share buttons, but that stops scaling pretty fast. Extreme example: programming would be nearly impossible with such an approach. But there are plenty of other examples, scientific/engineering work being one where the search+share paradigm just falls apart. Even just running a photography business would quickly become a nightmare if you had to rely on search for everything.