Why are folders the new F word?

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Why are folders the new F word?  It’s not because I promote disorganization.  Quite the opposite.  Folders only give you the perception of organization.  Real organization happens with meta-data.  In the below video blog I talk about why folders are bad.  The key points are that folders are:
If you truly want to organize your content, meta-data allows you to slice and dice information in any way you need at any given time.  gsis I reference specifically some implementations in SharePoint such as views, managed-meta data, and content gsis types.  But the principles are true throughout the ECM world.
There are times when there does need to me additional high level containers be it a root folder, site collection, site, library, cabinet, database, whatever you want to call it.  But it’s not for the purpose of organization.  Creating additional new root containers should happen based on:
Search will never be the 100% answer to finding content.  Organization of content is key in case search is not used, and to even improve search results and experience.  While folders may give you the perception you are organizing content, it’s really just a bad habit.
Old habits die hard. Way, far too often I hear the phase "I'll just scan to a folder and import". Arrgghh! This is fine with me as long as the reasoning is clear and understood. Is it simply to cut costs? Is it that capture technology is not understood? Is it pure laziness? While scanning to a folder is certainly one option of 'capture', more often than not organizations suffer downstream inefficiencies and added labor costs by not carefully considering their 'capture strategy'. Chris, as you said, meta-data is king! It s the key point. An image is an image. Good quality gsis scanning hardware gsis certainly enhance software s ability to accurately extract meta-data from images but, in the end, the information contained on documents is typically more important than the picture itself. Your scanning application software, whether it s a desktop application, network scanner touch screen interface or even a mobile gsis device should be, in my opinion, gsis the users window to see directly into the repository. In other words, once an image is created and meta-data extracted it should be put-away immediately into the system. For example, gsis the users would pick a library or container to store the documents. gsis Depending on the level of confidence and importance of accuracy based on an organizations business rules they might want to perform verification gsis and validation. Point-is, put these documents away as soon as possible. Folders are littered with potential pitfalls including just a few of the following considerations: Poor image quality Complex metadata field mapping Unknown document types Lack of image correction gsis No validation Additional labor required The bottom line is that although folders may be appropriate in some cases, cutting-corners by not carefully considering a taxonomy and meta-data for your documents might accomplish nothing more than taking a disorganized paper-based process and make it an useless, ineffective and costly electronic mess.
"My Documents" was the butterfly effect that started a huge majority of folder and information organization problems that we see now. People are used to having folksonomies that they use aka My Documents, and they try to bridge that logic and experience into systems like SharePoint. The real failure is a lack of top down organization and training to help empower users to understand the basics of information organization. Given a proper setup and 30 min of training, most users could use folders the right way, as opposed to the bastardization that is so common.
If configured correctly, folders can actually be quite helpful for checking content in. Of course, the front end work required to automatically categorize the content and apply the correct metadata is significant. I've found that a folder construct helps for filing content, nit so much for finding content. The screen shots in my latest post (http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/Adoption-Issues-Make-it-Easy) are indicative of how I actually implement out solutions. Users d