- It only solves the problem of communicating categories to another person/party with its brevity. 12.03, easy to tell others. But all this at the expense of the following things.
- There is no way to immediately know what 12.03 means. One has to carry a look up table. You can replace it with 2 char code. For example, Finance.Taxes to FN.TX. Why use numbers? Is the ordering important? Why not use char?
- What if categories do overlap? GMail solved this problem in 2005 with labels instead of folders. You can apply multiple tags. Tagging should be enum-like, while tagging it should show what tags already exist so that you dont create two seperate but similar tags, for e.g. Finance and Finances.
- The author dismisses search without giving any reason. Search is amazing for digital documents that is not possible in physical analog documents. The focus should be on tags + keywords or description of the document. Then use something like Algolia search to find stuff - it is extremely forgiving and powerful. Ofcourse, I am just speaking in general about data organization, not specifically about OS-level folders. For that, I think we're stuck with what the OS provides as a search engine. On MacOS, I think Alfred does a better job of searching, haven't used it personally though.
- You can still assign a unique ID to the document, after all thats all the 12.03 scheme does. You can communicate precisely to Jane, "Hey Jane, the document is B75AE2". Jane types that in the search engine and there is no need to weed through folders.
- Additional metadata such as year, author, owner, etc. would help with search.
Instead of making search powerful and contextualizing it, the author expends his arguments on frivolous pursuit of Johnny.Decimal.