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Link Good Consumer Apps Don’t Expose the Filesystem

Consumer apps are moving to the cloud. No news there, we all know it. One unifying characteristic of well designed cloud-based applications is that they don’t expose the file system to the user. Do you think about the file system on Gmail? What about when you are using Google Docs?

The computer filesystem is an engineering concept, designed by the geeks who created computers. It has nearly no useful purpose in mainstream computing.

Apps that expose the filesystem are uniformly focused on the wrong level of the problem if they are being pitched at consumers. The best example would be the consumer backup services out there like box.net and Mozy. These are fine services for small businesses. But as a consumer, forget about it. Use a hosted service in the cloud that solves the underlying problem.

Don’t backup your email, use Gmail. Don’t Backup your photos and videos. Use Phanfare to manage them. What if you want to create a spreadsheet? Use google docs. What about backing up your tax forms form TurboTax? Just use the web version! Any service that promises to sync your hard drive to the cloud is a waste of time. But wait you say. How do I backup all my personal files that I create with MS office? You have lots of files you create with MS Office? You are not mainstream. You probably look more like a small business, in which case, soak in the file system.

Consumer devices can be divided along similar lines. The Blackberry and iPhone are both great consumer devices and neither one shows you the file system. The Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation both have available web browsers, but no user-visible file system to corrupt. On the other hand, the standard Windows PC shows you the file system and PCs are notoriously difficult for consumers to keep running and manage. Macs are really only slightly better.

We will eventually see a great consumer appliance that allows you to access the internet, run a web browser and do everything you want to do while providing no access to the underlying file system. This embedded device will probably run some form of Unix under the covers but that will be transparent to the consumer. A good bet is that the first such device will be a multi-touch tablet computer from Apple.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 6:21 pm and is filed under Apple, Cloud Computing, General, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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    One thing I learned at PMA this year is that people understand files. They're comfortable with files. Files feel like tangible things to them. Entries in some "cloud" somewhere are not nearly as comforting. People don't trust online services with their precious files, especially photos. If you hide where the photo files are, the user feels like the file is "gone" into some "black hole" and he/she has lost control of it.

    Furthermore, people like to use their photo files in lots of ways, in lots of applications, not just yours. They want to make copies of the photo files, back up the photo files, use the photo files as "profile photos" in Facebook, etc etc.
 

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