Word documents will be saved to the cloud automatically on Windows going forward

More than anything, Microsoft is incompetent at messaging and communications.

This is a feature that has been among the most loved aspects of its main competitor for more than a decade.

Somehow, Microsoft managed to make the same feature sound and feel and be creepy.

It's even simpler.

People who wanted that kind of treatment and walled garden already moved to apple's ecosystem, and people who do not want this stayed with windows.

Now more and more of my non-technical friends are moving towards linux because microsoft is pushing them away.

Their competitor is cloud native, so where else would it be stored?

This is still a local app, so it doesn't feel like a natural default.

While incompetence might be an issue, I think the greater problem is that Microsoft is rolling back control and generally sucks at UX.

Why does this app that's been working just fine as desktop software need to save anything to the cloud by default? It's conceptually odd.

I've used Google docs from the beginning, but I actively choose what docs I want on that platform.

All MS had to do was add "save to cloud" as an additional save option along with "save" and "save as" (maybe renamed as "save to desktop") then auto save could activate where your last save location was. This would be good design.

It should be the default for corp accounts. But even home users would benefit form seamless document retrieval (recovery).

Corp users’s biggest IT headache is lost Word or Excel files.

Microsoft could announce that they've made kittens live forever and people would complain.

I think the main competitor for Microsoft Office is Google, which indeed defaults to saving documents in the cloud.

Apple, as far as i know, still gives you a choice.

OneDrive has to manage synchronising the cloud with multiple, potentially independently updated, local copies. This is a much harder problem than anything Google have tried to tackle, with more ways for things to go wrong compared to "no internet connectivity? No documents for you!"

This has the effect that (to a first approximation) everyone knows someone with a horrific OneDrive data loss story, no-one particularly trusts OneDrive with anything actually important, and so no-one wants to be forced to use it for everything.

I've no idea what you mean by "walled garden" w/r/t MacOS, but I understand it's an article of faith on HN.

Again, for the Nth time, you can run any software you like on a Mac. You can do anything you want. App store? Of course. Direct vendor download? You bet. Build from source? No problem.

Further, this line is out of place here because Microsoft is FAR more invasive about pushing cloud-first storage than Apple has ever been. No app on my Mac default to saving to iCloud. NONE.

> People who wanted that kind of treatment and walled garden already moved to apple's ecosystem, and people who do not want this stayed with windows.

Probably mostly applicable to people who know about "ecosystems", rather than normies who view computers mostly as another type of hammer (a tool).

Google drive provides the exact same sync functionality.

You can do whatever you want inside the garden, but moving away from it is becoming increasingly harder and harder - hence walled garden.

you can't bring your software with you, you can't bring your licenses with you, and all services are available only inside it.

CRDTs have existed for decades and Google uses them along with an offline feature. This is not nearly as hard as you’re making it sound.

Web applications (even those with interactive editing!) can store all data locally instead of remotely if desired. See Excalidraw for a nice example.

Direct vendor download? Sure, as long as it’s signed with an attestation key that’s countersigned by Apple. Running an app not signed this way is definitely possible, but requires invoking a hidden menu and then still has startup delay as the attestation check fails.

Not sure why you're being downvoted but this is exactly it.

You're forced by what's given to you and can only use within the garden on only the device you own.

Microsoft: We’ve opted all users not on the Ultimate edition into the mandatory Kitten Soul Cage.

Fans: You people will complain about everything!

They separate Google drive functionality from Google docs sync

Different platforms have always had this property. Was VAX/VMS a walled garden because you had to replace software switching to BSD?

Do not decry the value of a hammer. There are more specialized tools, and they have their place. A shared property we value is that you can put the hammer down, and it stays a hammer. It doesn't Develop Ideas about spying on you, it doesn't pivot to being an awl, the handle doesn't spontaneously fall off, you don't have to re-learn how to hammer things.

I have to re-learn how to use software very regularly, and as more and more things become software I have lost some functional skills because there are only 24 hours in a day and I can't stay current on everything. If I haven't done a thing in six years, it means I need to research what the current software tool for doing that thing is, try installing four of those things and land on the one that isn't broken or some type of malware, and then teach myself an entirely new interface over time. I just wanted to hit a nail! My hammer was installed on my old computer! I knew that hammer!

But no, it's never that simple with software. I can learn 150 software tools to do specific things and have to re-learn something every week just to maintain capability. I don't have to do that with hammers, wrenches, saws, etc.

We need more hammer-like tools instead of managed, constantly updated "ecosystems", and when we do find a good one, we need a way to keep it. Because we have finite time and cognitive bandwidth.

"That was deprecated three years ago, why are you still trying to use an old version that doesn't even have security updates? What is wrong with you?! [WONTFIX]"... Fuck you, give me back my fucking hammer. I could do this task I'm trying to do in literally 90 seconds ten years ago; I'm an hour deep into determining how you would even begin to do it today.

There must be a name for this fallacy. You know where it goes:

Person/Company does crappy thing

People complain

Fanboy says "Person/Company could do amazing thing and people would still complain"

... when it's very obvious that company/person didn't do anything good.

I've seen it so many times there must be a name for it. Anyone know what it is?

>Somehow, Microsoft managed to make the same feature sound and feel and be creepy.

The company they're imitating (poorly, as always) is one I've found so creepy that I actively go out of my way to distance myself from. For at least the last decade at this point. If Microsoft is being creepy too, this just means they'e successfully imitated the competition... for once.

CRDTs would be lovely, wouldn't they?

However, OneDrive's promise is "save your files and photos to OneDrive and access them from any device, anywhere". Accordingly, the model OneDrive actually exposes to the user is directory trees of arbitrary files containing what, for OneDrive's purposes, are opaque blobs. This leads to all the behaviours you'd expect from a distributed system using such a model, and therefore the trust issues the public has with MS distributed systems.

Regaining someone's trust in a vendor after a bad experience, even for a different product, is very hard.

I don’t think kittens living forever would work out well, if you think about it.

It's basically shooting the messenger, which is an ad hominem.

Who's incompetence? When half their users need to ask "what's a cloud", that option is too complicated. What's sensible and reasonable and logical to us, isn't to the rest of the world.

I'm not sure they're quite the same. If noone else has coined a term for it I'll go with the "cancer cure fallacy" but maybe someone has a better name. Open to suggestions!

> Microsoft is rolling back control

Agreed. Functionality like this should be presented as a choice in an OOBE welcoming screen right after installation. And it should be _a choice,_ something that can be reversed at a later date if the decision was wrong.

I mean, by that standard Linux is a walled garden, because you probably can't take all your apps and data with you to another system without significant overhead.

I'm no spring chicken. I've had painful migrations. I'm not interested in tools that don't have an exit. Nothing about a normal Mac setup is locked-in. I could migrate my data to Linux, I expect, with minimal hassle. I mean, I wouldn't, because I enjoy the network effects of using the Apple ecosystem, and I find MacOS more pleasing to interact with than any Linux window manager I've yet seen. But it's absolutely possible for me to leave, and simple to do so.

There's no lock in.

HN as always drastically overstates how hard it is to run non-AppStore software.

Yes, the Mac defaults to a stricter policy than most HN readers would want. Mass market computers SHOULD. That they don't is a reason we have so much malware on the Aunt Millie PCs of the world.

HN readers are more technical. We want to do what we want to do, but we have to understand that what WE want isn't what's right for the average user. As long as a platform gives us a path to download a random utility from a buddy's site or whatever, it's fine.

It's very, very easy to set a Mac to run whatever you want. Nothing is hidden about it. Is it different than it was under Sonoma? Yes, but the changes are well documented and there are countless articles online, including at Apple, that explain the trivial steps required.

Begging the Question.

Step 1: Assume your claim is already true, e.g. "Microsoft is a still good corporate actor in spite of doing X".

Step 2: Manufacture circular logic to support your claim from Step 1.

In other words, the poster is begging the question to be self-evident, rather than producing evidence to support their claim.

Lol what a shit take

That sounds like an extreme amount of incompetence to me.

I understand that you run into this problem with third party software like Dropbox, because they aren't natively integrated with the OS and therefore need to do some unreliable file tagging to support basic operations like renaming, moving or copying files, but Microsoft controls the entire OS.

They can scan the filesystem journal for file system operations. They can build custom OneDrive specific features into their file explorer. They have an office suite that can directly integrate with OneDrive.

Yet they chose to not do that and instead decided that they really ought to collect all your data for training AI instead.

Pages and the rest of the iWork suite save to iCloud by default.

Both Apple and Microsoft give you the choice of where you want to save.

Truly, your analysis and rhetorical skill dazzle us all.

> That they don't is a reason we have so much malware on the Aunt Millie PCs of the world.

Please, tell us more. Or are you talking about the OS that run on Aunt Millie PC ? That makes sense.