I stumbled on an interesting blog post today titled Why Files Exist which contains the following excerpt

Whenever there is a conversation about the future of computing, the discussion inevitably turns to the notion of a “File.” After all, most tablets and phones don’t show the user anything that resembles a file, only Apps that contain their own content, tucked away inside their own opaque storage structure.

This is wrong. Files are abstraction layers around content that are necessary for interoperability. Without the notion of a File or other similar shared content abstraction, the ability to use different applications with the same information grinds to a halt, which hampers innovation and user experience.

Given that one of the hats I wear in my day job is responsibility for the SkyDrive API, questions like whether the future of computing should include an end user facing notion of files and how interoperability across apps should work are often at the top of my mind. I originally wasn’t going to write about this blog post until I saw the discussion on Hacker News which was a bit disappointing since people either decided to get very pedantic on the specifics of how a computer file is represented in the operating system or argued that inter-app sharing between apps via intents (on Android) or contracts (in Windows 8/Windows RT) makes the notions of files obsolete.

The app-centric view of data (as espoused by iOS) is that apps own any content created within the app and there is no mechanism outside the app’s user experience to interact with or manage this data. This also means there is no global namespace where other apps or the end user can interact with this data also known as a file system. There are benefits to this approach such as greatly simplifying the concepts the user has to deal with and preventing both the user or other apps from mucking with the app’s experience. There are also costs to this approach as well.

The biggest cost is as highlighted in the Why Files Exist post is that interoperability is compromised. The reason is that it is a well known truism that data outlives applications. My contact list, my music library and the code for my side projects across the years are all examples of data which has outlived the original applications I used to create and manage them. The majority of this content is in the cloud today primarily because I want universal access to my data from any device and any app. A world where moving from Emacs to Visual Studio or WinAmp to iTunes means losing my files created in those applications would be an unfortunate place to live in the long term.

App-to-app sharing as is done with Android intents or contracts in Windows 8 is a powerful way to create loosely coupled integration between apps. However there is a big difference between one off sharing of data (e.g. share this link from my browser app to my social networking app) to actual migration or reuse of data (e.g. import my favorites and passwords from one browser app to another). Without a shared global namespace that all apps can access (i.e. a file system) you cannot easily do the latter.

The Why Files Exist ends with

Now, I agree with Steve Jobs saying in 2005 that a full blow filesystem with folders and all the rest might not be necessary, but in every OS there needs to be at least some user-facing notion of a file, some system-wide agreed upon way to package content and send it between applications. Otherwise we’ll just end up with a few monolithic applications that do everything poorly.

Here I actually slightly disagree with characterizing the problem as needing a way to package content and send it between applications. Often my data is actually conceptually independent of an application and it is more like I want to give access to my data to apps not that I want to package up some of my data from one app to another. For example, I wouldn’t characterize playing my MP3s originally ripped in Winamp or bought from Amazon MP3 in iTunes as packaging content between those apps and iTunes. Rather there is a global concept known as my music library which multiple apps can add to or play from.

So back to the question that is the title of this blog post; have files outlived their usefulness? Only if you think reusing data across multiple applications has.

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