A perspective on the per-application silo model

[dasyatid1]

(This is also posted on the fediverse at mastodon.online.)

From the catalog of thoughts I had hazy intentions of actually researching and writing up in detail, and then didn't, and sat on it for like five years or whatever—so, screw it, have the sloppy version: a certain perspective on how the silo model of per-app data wound up predominating in the consumer sphere.

(Probably it's been done before, but I don't know where. We still don't have good concept-shape reference search. Maybe someone who reads this will know?)

In UX, it seems common wisdom that your design should try to follow the user's model of the interaction. What do they expect to happen? What meshes with their approach and habits? The deeper version of this (at least from my peanut-gallery perspective) was involved in the focus shift from “UI” to “UX”: if the machine model is too at odds with the user model, remake the application to fit the user, rather than dictating from the manual and expecting the user to comply.

Some of you probably remember growing up with PCs around the time they started coming into the mainstream, and becoming the de facto tech support hub for less computing-oriented family members. So you might remember this conversation:

“But where did you save the letter?”

“In Word.”

Among other things, user-managed storage and lower prevalence of networking made this less practical as a machine model where uses spanned computers. Lower-capacity physical media made user management of storage volumes more pressing. (How many diskettes does that come on?) And, a bit further down the line, lack of sophisticated search infrastructure made user organization of files more immediately beneficial.

With subsidized datacenter storage and an assumption of high-speed Internet access everywhere?

Observe what the default user model was, back in the 1990s.

Solve for the equilibrium.