The article sort of hints at it, but the (near-to-mid) future is incremental improvement, not radical overhaul.

The desktop metaphor is already dead. And I don't mean "dead" as in "Microsoft is dead [to certain people in certain ways]", I mean that very few people are really using a desktop interface any more. Compare Windows 3.1 to a modern system, like Vista or Gnome. The remaining Desktop metaphor items are there out of inertia more than anything else.

Directories may still have "folder" icons, but they are not even remotely bound by the folder metaphor anymore. They may open as web pages or photo albums or a music browser, or through the component architectures, anything else. Several sorting options are available, and nobody asks "Does this make sense from a 'desktop' 'folder' point of view?" before they implement something like a recursive file size view. In fact, in general, nobody ever asks that question, because the metaphor doesn't matter to anybody anymore.

What we did is bootstrapped from the desktop into a generalized windowing environment. It is not the desktop that we have stagnated on, we moved past that anyhow, it is the windowing environment. Windows are now the base cognitive metaphor, and that is already relatively freeing compared to thinking we're stuck on the "desktop".

What are the real purpose of Windows? The real purpose is also the weakness people are grasping at but I don't think generally get right: They keep the complexity of adding verbs at (roughly) O(n) on the verbs by isolating them from each other. If I pop open Firefox, it is shielded from my word processor and vice versa; they only know of each other across the clipboard, if that. If I want to write an entirely new app, I don't have to worry about what else is running on the desktop, I just pop open a new window and I'm in my own world.

We intuitively grasp that if we could break this isolation, we could have "better" interfaces, but it only works for the beginning part of the O(n^2) curve. That's why we keep seeing these promising demos of new interface ideas that go nowhere; it all works to manipulate photos (the go-to task), but it comes crashing down when we try to implement the full suite of nouns and verbs we all actually want in the new O(n^2) complex world. Our intuition is actually wrong here, because our intuition is glibly gliding past the part of the problem where you actually have to start implementing the whole world in your brand new paradigm.

I see something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiLzbNiEyj8 and think: It's great to show how easy it is to manipulate photos, but... how do I also manipulate music? Word documents, which really don't thumbnail worth a crap? Upload to arbitrary locations? Handle 100,000 photos? Integrate photo manipulation into the interface seamlessly (since opening a new app like Photoshop misses the point of the criticism)? What happens if I get an IM during this process? How do I attach this to an email, and how would I type the email? How would I have multiple competing implementations of the IM, email, photo manipulation, etc. that I could switch between if they didn't meet my needs? You can answer these questions and the hundreds more that come up in real life, but it starts looking like "a reskinning of traditional interfaces with a couple of nice optimizations for the photo case" instead of "a radical break from the windows paradigm that will change computing forever!" really quickly.

We are in this local optima for good reasons. If you want out, you first need to understand why we are here. (And don't mistake this post for fatalism; show me a new paradigm of value and I will jump all over it! But it's going to be hard work.)

(PS: Note how moving to web apps only furthers the isolation of processes. At least local OSes have a "file" abstraction, web apps don't even naturally have that, and while shipping a desktop app that didn't speak all the relevant file formats would be nearly unthinkable (MS Office being the exception, not the rule), web apps have a lot of incentive towards lockin. Personally, I'm still down on them, long-term. I'd rather have local apps with net-backed storage for almost anything I can think of doing, because anything else will actually manifest as a regression against the desktop metaphor, which we all already instinctively think of as somewhat limiting....)