[r0s]

I work with novice users every day. Every part of the experience is unnatural to them. Using a mouse and typing is just as frightening as any software quirk. Scroll bars, application windows, the web browser as internet, even the very concept of saving something in any form.

Teacher: "This program saves your changes automatically"

User: "But how do I know for sure?"

[dmoney]

As a programmer, I would be frightened of something that saved my changes automatically, without a way to force a save or verify its saved-ness. What if the auto-save stopped working and didn't tell me?

[stck]

What if the manual-save stopped working and didn't tell you?

You made a change - that's it. You don't save your paper after drawing on it with a pencil, do you? Death of filesystem, rise of tags, automatic saving and versioning go all hand-in-hand.

[dmoney]

What if the manual-save stopped working and didn't tell you?

I suppose it's equally as likely. The example I'm thinking of is losing your network connection while typing an e-mail in GMail. It shows a warning message, but out of the way so you might not notice. If you intentionally take an action to save, you are more likely to notice the result (and a good user interface would make a failed intentional save obvious by a popup message or something).

You made a change - that's it. You don't save your paper after drawing on it with a pencil, do you?

Depends. If I was drawing something remotely important, there would probably be many revisions, some of which I'd want to keep, some of which I'd want to throw away. Some of which I'd want to make a separate copy of to work in a different direction. So yeah, versioning. How do you version things without files?

[r0s]

Try explaining versioning to a novice user.

At the very least you have iterations represented as dates, fragmenting whatever metaphor is supposed to replace the filesystem.

Tags have the same problem, once the list of tagged items becomes too big tags get used as directories. Tagging seems best at showing popularity/frequency, but this does not replace directories in any meaningful way.