Dustin Curtis, “The Death Of Files”:

The concept of a file as a container to hold a piece of content is dying. The contents inside the files are becoming the central actors for creating user interactions. Computers are becoming more human, and part of the evolutionary process requires them to more closely complement the human brains built-in systems for interacting with the world.

For me, “recently used documents” has largely replaced the use of the Finder on Mac OS X, and while I claim to have a file system organization scheme, my actual usage is moving towards “document soup” which I navigate view time (recent documents) and search (“the document named X”, or “the document in which I wrote Y”). Both of these tasks take place from within the application I’m using (the latter typically from within the “Open” dialog), not from the Finder.