Tagging is the best system for managing files ever conceived. David Kidd wonders what Google is so afraid of.
Think back to a time when operating systems were based on simple, word-based command line concepts. It was a handy state of affairs, given that computers were accessed by typing in commands rather than pointing at an graphical object, and you only needed to know about ‘files’ and ‘directories’. It was an elegant language that was suitable for the simple, hierarchical representation of early operating systems, but it was inappropriate for the impending arrival of graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
The GUI brought us a raft of new analogies like ‘documents’, ‘folders’ and ‘desktops’. Because each new term had a real-world analogue, it was easy for users to learn and migrate to, and conveniently gave GUI designers a set of recognisable icons and verbs (like drag and drop). If documents are stored in folders in your physical office, you would expect that the documents on the computer (with icons resembling sheets of paper) could be dragged into the icon of a manila folder.
But the problem with analogies like this is that they’re intuitively linked to the limitations of their real-world counterpart. For example, if I were to file my electricity bill in my filing cabinet, I’d need to place it in either the ‘bills’, ‘electricity’, ‘expenses’, or ‘paid’ folders. Unless I make copies to place in the other folders, or use a highly granular (and cumbersome) filing structure, this simply doesn’t work. And as computers are much more flexible than a filing cabinet, we shouldn’t have to put up with it either.
Consequently, we’re now at a boundary between the old filing analogy of the first GUIs, and what I call the file ‘soup’. The file soup situation is where hard drives are simply filled with files - with utter disregard for folders or directories - and the metadata is logged, indexed and searchable. This is precisely the system that Microsoft originally planned to build into Vista (and would have consequently made it a true next generation OS), and it’s the same methodology (called tagging) that Google and many other Web 2.0 companies employ today.
In contrast to folders and documents, tagging lets you designate any number of custom tags to any file. These tags are then used in a search engine to bring up, say, every document that’s tagged with ‘bill’, ‘electricity’ and ‘paid’. It’s simple, intuitive, and makes far better use of the power of a computer, rather than the limitations of a physical filing cabinet. And it’s such a revolution that we’ll wonder how we did without it.
Due to the ingrained ‘foldering’ mentality of most computer users, Google’s fundamental use of tags (also known as labels) for Gmail and Google Documents was admirable, both in its contempt for the old folder structure, and its righteous insistence on dragging users into the future. Many users begged for the familiar folder structure, but Google maintained its stance that tags were better than folders. And they were.
So why, after all these years, has Google gone back to the old, inferior representation of folders for Google Documents? Apparently, many users couldn’t figure out the spartan system, so Google threw the baby out with the bathwater and took a step backwards. Astoundingly, documents can exist in multiple folders in Google Documents - which means each folder is actually a tag - but many users will likely never use it as a tag, because they will revert to the old folder mindset.
The Google I knew and loved would have obstinately rejected such calls to revert to a folder system. Google Documents still requires a lot of work to replace Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, but this is not the way to do it. Instead of reverting to a system it knows is flawed, Google should have created an interface that migrates users to the new system, rather than confusing them with a hybrid model like this.
Let’s hope this latest change in thinking doesn’t flow into Google’s other innovative services, or worse, that other companies follow suit. Sometimes, the customer isn’t always right.