Why Personal Information Management (PIM) Technologies Are Not Widespread

Users of computer systems create and store valuable personal information in files, email folders, and bookmark collections. For decades, the main principle of interacting with files, emails, and bookmarks has remained unchanged: hierarchical directory trees
with standard (Windows Explorer style) browsers.
Users often have problems both in classifying new items and maintaining a classification hierarchy as such. With files, emails, and bookmarks, users often end up maintaining three parallel classification hierarchies, one in each tool. Over the past thirty years,
a number of alternative personal information management (PIM) tools have emerged, but the typical user is still faced with hierarchical directory structures.
This position paper addresses some of the reasons why modern PIM tools are not widespread and proposes a set of eight requirements for future PIM tools.