I keep passports, degree certificates, deeds, health insurance docs.. the things I would grab if I was running out the door, in a single box file.
Everything else is basically unsorted, maybe vaguely sorted by date of putting on top of the pile, by placing things together after searching for them once, or by 'I think I know where I saw it'.
I have tried putting everything in themed folders, it's a waste of time. The time spent searching for something is much less than the time spent organizing everything in advance. The modal piece of paper will be thrown away after a few years without ever having been needed.
Is that not effectively a first-level hierarchy with no further subdivisions? The "important stuff" category and "everything else" category are already a useful taxonomy, even if very minimalist.
Do you mean Joe the Plumber from London, UK or Joe the Plumber from London, Ohio ?
We all know how this ends up. It ends up being like Google where the search engine uses word embeddings and the like and removes word from your search queries or replaces November by December because they are both months so you can substitute one for the other right ?
They could help if the tags were 'Occupation = Plumber' and 'Name = Joe'. Now a search for all files where both tags are present will get you Joe the Plumber's invoices. If you want everything from any plumber or from any person named Joe, then just leave off one of the tags from your search. It is very much like when querying rows in a relational database, just adjust your WHERE clause.
I agree. Unfortunately, right now the 'well structured relational database' is completely separate from the file system. Didgets was designed to combine the two into a single coherent system so that you can't update one without the other. By 'combining' doesn't mean I did what WinFS tried to do and just take a filesystem and a database and stick them together somehow. I built a completely new system from the ground up that incorporates traditional filesystem features (block allocation, stream management, metadata control, folder hierarchies, etc.) with solid relational database features (schema, tags).
IBM identified back in the 70s their core asset and were very explicit about what it was. "No one gets fired for buying IBM." Their key strategy since then has been to monetize this asset in a variety of creative, and mainly very effective ways.
Thinkpads were a great example of this. Laptops which promised decent quality and support for a high price. When the laptop market was demystified and commodified, IBM correctly got out of it - for a decent price.
If some random start-up, or even Google, had built Watson, it would have correctly been seen as a gimmick. Instead it sold literally billions of software consulting to people who thought they needed AI but actually just needed a search box with dynamic autosuggestion. Would you rather get some junior guy to hack something together using open source tools, or would you rather pay IBM 50 times as much? If you chose the former, you're simply not in the target market.
The hybrid cloud is exactly the same game - as is made quite clear in that ad, it's pitched at middle management who don't want to look like chumps for ignoring the cloud, but don't want to fuck up by moving to it.
Reputation is a difficult asset to monetize - effectively you make money from it by degrading and then destroying it. After all, if you carry living up to your good reputation, you're not extracting any advantage from it. IBM can't sell their reputation or their name to the highest bidder. All they can do is keep trawling for business lines where it gives them a comparative advantage.
It's easy to see this as unscrupulous - but their customers genuinely do get a benefit from the confidence they have in IBM.
