There was an article going around a while ago that was arguing most users these days, including the youth we often stereotype as "digital natives" who "get computers", don't understand file systems. They might not even know they exist as a concept.

Which makes sense if you've only ever really used modern UIs. You don't have to know anything about files and folders. I bet a lot of people don't even know they exist in any meaningful way.

Most users are shockingly ignorant, and a lot of them are not really paying enough attention or interested enough to learn much.

Yeah this is why Apple has been slowly peeling away traditional file / folder features from front and center. The user doesn’t care where or how they get their files, they just want them at any given time. Spotlight being the most successful at obfuscating where anything is yet allowing access to everything. Microsoft has started to pick up on that and attempt to solve the same problems.

Do you really need screen snapshot to do fine grained search though? It sounds like you’re describing Spotlight in some way https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(Apple)

I completely agree with this. I work as a User Experience researcher and I have been noticing this for some time. I'm not a traditional UX person, but work more at the intersection of UX and Programming. I think the core problem when it comes to discussion about any software product is the people talking about it, kind of assuming everyone else functions the same.

What you mentioned here as a techie, in simple terms is a person who uses or has to use the computer and file system everyday. They spend a huge amount of time with a computer and slowly they organise stuff. And most of the time they want more control over their stuff, and some of them end up in Linux based systems, and some find alternative ways.

There are two other kinds of people. One is a person who uses the computer everyday but is completely limited to their enterprise software. Even though they spend countless hours on the computer, they really don't end up using the OS most of the time. A huge part of the service industry belongs to this group. Most of the time they have a dedicated IT department who will take care of any issue.

The third category is people who rarely use computers. Means they use it once or twice in a few days. Almost all the people with non-white collar jobs belong to this category. This category mainly uses phones to get daily stuff done.

If you look at the customer base of Microsoft, it's never been the first. Microsoft tried really hard with .NET in the Balmer era, and even created a strong base at that time, but I am of the opinion that a huge shift happened with wide adoption of the Internet. In some forum I recently saw someone saying, TypeScript gave Microsoft some recognition and kept them relevant. They made some good contributions also.

So as I mentioned the customer base was always the second and third category. People in these categories focus only on getting stuff done. Bare minimum maintenance and get results by doing as little as possible. Most of them don't really care about organising their files or even finding them. Many people just redownload stuff from email, message apps, or drives, whenever they need a file. Microsoft tried to address this by indexed search inside the OS, but it didn't work out well because of the resource requirements and many bugs. For them a feature like Recall or Spotlight of Apple is really useful.

The way Apple and even Android are going forward is in this direction. Restricting the user to the surface of the product and making things easy to find and use through aggregating applications. The Gallery app is a good example. Microsoft knew this a long back. 'Pictures', 'Documents' and all other folders were just an example. They never 'enforced' it. In earlier days people used to have separate drives for their documents because, Windows did get corrupted easily and when reinstalling only the 'C:' drive needs to be formatted. Only after Microsoft started selling pre-installed Windows through OEMs, they were able to change this trend.

Windows is also pushing in this same direction. Limiting users to the surface, because the two categories I mentioned don't really 'maintain' their system. Just like in the case of a car, some people like to maintain their own car, and many others let paid services to take care of it. But when it comes to 'personal' computers, with 'personal' files, a 'paid' service is not an option. So this lands on the shoulders of the OS companies as an opportunity. Whoever gives a better solution people will adopt it more.

Microsoft is going to land in many contradictions soon, because of their early widespread adoption of AI. Their net zero global emission target is a straightforward example of this.

As a species we have invented something called "indexes" that solve exactly that kind of problem. We actually have an entire field of science called information retrieval, that doesn't require screenshotting your whole life to produce the same result.

I don’t think that the software world has done a great job of letting people control that data lifetime. And I think that it’s something that a user should reasonably be able to expect out of their computer.

That's true.

I once thought about this, that maybe it's a good idea to use a tagged and maybe log-style filesystem, where 1) every directory name in file path becomes a tag for it, other than the user-added tags (which can be searched separately), 2) there are temporary and permanent files, where temporary ones are deleted once their lifetime passes or that plus once the space is required, while permanent ones are stored indefinitely, 3) with hardlink functionality transparently available to the user, from the GUI, 4) the GUI itself should drop the bullshit and return to DOS times in the sense of control - with this thing I describe it may well be that the casual user won't feel as lost as they do now.

Maybe (again, transparent and user-accessible) filesystem overlays for every application are a good idea too here, like with Docker, chroots, MacOS DMG images, etc.

In addition to that indexing file contents may make sense too, like you said.

Frankly there are so many good things one can do which haven't been done, before just OCR`ing everything on the screen and storing it.

About "why MS chose this" - because they consistently choose the dumbest and ugliest way to deal with any problem. The heaviest artillery available, to look relevant.

Offtopic - the searchable start menu problem is what scares me off Gnome every time I try it. You just get that tablet-like one-level place with a search field and icons. A frigging lot of fscking icons for every dot-desktop file Gnome found. Then I panic and get back to FVWM.