I think the article uses "File" and "Icon" interchangeably. I would agree that fear of having to many icons/shortcuts on the desktop is irrational, because vis

I think the article uses "File" and "Icon" interchangeably. I would agree that fear of having to many icons/shortcuts on the desktop is irrational, because visual single click icons/shortcuts were created specifically to be on the desktop. However, machines can be formatted to run more efficiently based on organization of file types, so you would not want to save various files types directly to the desktop. For example in Windows files can be customized to run optimally for files containing music, video, documents or pictures. Checking my Windows 8 the Desktop itself can not be customized to run optimally for any particular file type, nor would you even want to if you were saving multiple file types on the desktop.