> I'd estimate 9 out of 10 people have all their documents in a single flat folder, which they only access through their word processor or whatever they use to open them
I could not agree less: Most people I know follow about the regular OS distribution, ie., most on Windows, some on Linux, and a few on OSX, plus the odd geek using what-not... The only cases that matches your "9/10 observations" are the few guys using OSX, and even then many converted from Windows and keep using their OS just as they did before. And everybody else is using a system where he cannot easily organize stuff through apps (ie., we probably all agree that OSX has the best inter-app interoperability) or otherwise is experienced enough to want full control of their own data and therefore keeps his data organized, eg., in a Dropbox folder hierarchy. And given the majority of people I know are Windows users with very little "IT knowledge", their behaviour is what I would put into the majority bin. According to my own obeservations at least, nearly all of these user-types rely on some increadibly convoluted folder hierarchy to store their music, photos, documents and the odd video.
Note that I am not arguing about the best way to organize folders and files, all I am saying is that AFAIK the very large majority of users does organize their files in deep folder structures (and, is using Windows Explorer to do that, too...).
I could not agree less: Most people I know follow about the regular OS distribution, ie., most on Windows, some on Linux, and a few on OSX, plus the odd geek using what-not... The only cases that matches your "9/10 observations" are the few guys using OSX, and even then many converted from Windows and keep using their OS just as they did before. And everybody else is using a system where he cannot easily organize stuff through apps (ie., we probably all agree that OSX has the best inter-app interoperability) or otherwise is experienced enough to want full control of their own data and therefore keeps his data organized, eg., in a Dropbox folder hierarchy. And given the majority of people I know are Windows users with very little "IT knowledge", their behaviour is what I would put into the majority bin. According to my own obeservations at least, nearly all of these user-types rely on some increadibly convoluted folder hierarchy to store their music, photos, documents and the odd video.
Note that I am not arguing about the best way to organize folders and files, all I am saying is that AFAIK the very large majority of users does organize their files in deep folder structures (and, is using Windows Explorer to do that, too...).