[ygra]

There have been approaches to move the user away from files since at least the early 90s (I've written a minor thesis in uni about various of those approaches). However, one big reason I see that it didn't happen yet, is sharing. Sharing documents between applications, between computers or different users – it all works exceptionally well when working alone, but somewhere along the line is a tool that doesn't work with whatever semantic information management system you use and you have to drop down to files or at least an understanding how it all looks behind the scenes.

Either all applications implement ways of interfacing with all kinds of things to share information: E-mail, instant messaging, FTP, USB thumb drives, shared folders on a network, print, etc. or the OS provides some kind of method for generalized sharing and negotiation of content types to accept and send (the clipboard does this). Windows 8 provides that via its Share charm, but that cannot be used from the desktop (and I think Android's Intents can be used similarly).

The problem is that such solutions need to work across everything you use. If they don't, you fall back to more reliable methods. Even if that means that you have to hunt for the file somewhere in a folder hierarchy you don't understand (many people don't get hierarchical file systems; that's been known since quite some time) or the 5000-file Documents folder.