When was the last time you used one of these . Not the icon, but the actual physical media? I think it’s been at least three years since I owned a PC that could actually read them and a couple years before that since I’ve actually read something off of one.

Now everyone knows the Angry Monkey story right? To paraphrase it in a sentance:

Whenever you hear "...because we've always done it that way," first shut off the alarm in your head and secondly, ask for another reason.

It might be that the reason is valid, but it might be that no one knows.

Which brings me to the de facto save icon . I would be willing to bet the kids graduating college today have never in their years at university, or probably life, ever used a floppy disk, but every one of them knows it means to save their documents by clicking on it. Now, they know what one is, and might have seen a couple in their parents' desk drawer, but as visual correlation to its function, it falls well short.

Following the icons down the toolbar, the bold icon looks bold, the italics icon looks like it is read to fall over, but the save icon looks like a box, within a box.

But that's always been the save icon

Yes it has, but why? Because I use to actually put something that looked like that into my computer, click that button, and then take my stuff floppy disk out and walk away. Surely since we don’t save to floppies anymore there has to be a better icon. Some progressive company like Google surely thought this up already and I’m sure they have a cooler save icon on Google Docs. Nope. They still use . That’s actually a different icon, even through they look identical.

So why is the blue floppy disk the de facto save icon? What would a better icon be? Will people in 10 years still be putting floppy disks on their Minority Report UI’s? How could you even change something that is already soinstalled into nearly everyuser’s brainofevery software community.

There is probably no other visual clue that is so widely understood. Not even the X to close awindow is shared across platforms as much as the save icon. So maybe that is the reason why it has never changed and Tom Hanks is going to punch his floppy disk floating in mid air. The cost of breaking those now decades of education is too expensive.

We’re all going to be angry monkeys because angry is the new content. We stop you from climbing the latter, not because we know the outcome, because if you climb it, we all have to climb it in order for it to work.