This article is sort of missing the point.
Rupert is inadvertently right. The desktop metaphor
is done, as in finished - nobody cares. Files on a table is over. There was a point where my desktop got too messy in university and I went and turned off icons on it altogether and I never looked back. Google didn't even bother with the concept in android; files go to a magical box in the sky and you never see them, and some phones ship without a file explorer altogether. With the prevalence of OneDrive and other services, they do this on the home computer as well now too. It's the default in Office 365, probably one of the only apps a lot of people use on Windows now other than a browser. My workplace has all storage set to OneDrive by default, and I have to fight the computer to store a file locally, and the reality is that as much as I dislike it, it's invisible and you don't even notice.
Rupert also fails to comment on how most people are primarily using the browser anyway. He didn't even use the word in the article. Oh, sure, it's annoying to users that the flavors of windows change over time, but chrome hasn't changed and that's fine. It's probably more of a bother to people when facebook or youtube has a redesign every few years.
And we know this to be true because the statistics support it. Computer literacy didn't continue to drastically rise as time passed. The reality is that the medium got out of the way of the message, and nobody spends time looking at windows anymore. They don't have cute sample songs bundled with the OS anymore (how will future generations discover Mr. Scruff and his record label now??), the wallpapers kind of suck, but people don't change them anymore anyway, or anything else for that matter (you can hide the Cortana search bar but everyone I know doesn't even bother to do that). Do kids these days even know what a screensaver is? Invoking 95 like it's a peak of UX is completely missing the point. Windows, and OSX, and others, will continue to trend towards becoming invisible, like air, and will get out of the way.
Rupert also fails to comment on how most people are primarily using the browser anyway. He didn't even use the word in the article. Oh, sure, it's annoying to users that the flavors of windows change over time, but chrome hasn't changed and that's fine. It's probably more of a bother to people when facebook or youtube has a redesign every few years.
And we know this to be true because the statistics support it. Computer literacy didn't continue to drastically rise as time passed. The reality is that the medium got out of the way of the message, and nobody spends time looking at windows anymore. They don't have cute sample songs bundled with the OS anymore (how will future generations discover Mr. Scruff and his record label now??), the wallpapers kind of suck, but people don't change them anymore anyway, or anything else for that matter (you can hide the Cortana search bar but everyone I know doesn't even bother to do that). Do kids these days even know what a screensaver is? Invoking 95 like it's a peak of UX is completely missing the point. Windows, and OSX, and others, will continue to trend towards becoming invisible, like air, and will get out of the way.