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

There’s an important generational component that’s getting missed here.

Most children (American children, at least) grew up on Chromebooks. That instills a certain expectation of how these things work — documents save themselves.

To switch to Microsoft Office means adding a cryptic, unnecessary-seeming extra step. I imagine it feels something like having a laptop that's designed to be shut down before closing.

You’ve all heard the stories about college CS students who have to be told what a folder is — and those are the kids who actually want to work with computers. Now step back to the next generation of lawyers and nurses and novelists and think about their lifetime experience.

Microsoft is just chasing the puck.

You can have auto-save and automatic file naming without cloud storage

If their reasoning is to support the Chromebook/Phone generation... that would be earnest.

But I'd have to assume it's a more "data driven" reason (ie capturing context of docs).

Yep. First party and well behaved third party Mac apps have been doing so since… jeez, 10.7 Lion (released in 2011) I think?

The way it works there is that documents are auto-saved to a non-volatile app-specific temp directory until they’re explicitly saved, at which point they’re moved to the specified location and continue to be auto-saved there. Anybody who uses TextEdit as a temp text stash is familiar with this with the hoard of unsaved documents that comes back even after a cold boot.

Microsoft is just motivated to push cloud storage onto usage.

Microsoft removed auto-save of local files from the Mac version years ago.

> a laptop that's designed to be shut down

For the people who do shut it down, they do it by holding down the power button for 10+ seconds, because that’s how phones do it. On Windows at least, that causes a forced/crash shutdown.

> You’ve all heard the stories about college CS students who have to be told what a folder is

Back in the olden days of the early 90's when I was in school, I was working for the university's "Unix Group". Since I, being an undergrad, was the low man on the totem-pole there, I was always the one sent out to the various departments to do the support work on their workstations. The CS professors were, without question, the ones who knew the least about how to operate their machines. They mostly had no interest, as they were much more invested in CS theory than in practical use.

That's not Windows specific. It just forces power off on a firmware level, possibly even lower (the power management IC could have "hold to turn off" built in).

I'm almost positive that it's both and also a short-sighted "give the customer what they ask for" approach. You could easily achieve local auto save, or a clear "upload to the cloud" UX, or whatever else. But the user got confused about saving documents, sooooo cloud.

Then the data centralization is a nice plus that makes it impossible to go back on.

> Most children (American children, at least) grew up on Chromebooks. That instills a certain expectation of how these things work — documents save themselves.

I'd say iPads rather than Chromebooks, but the same applies - no concept of a file system, everything just living "in the cloud", the devices themselves being ultimately disposable - as long as you have iCloud set up, you can put your iPad in the shredder, and get all of your content back in under an hour.

Definitely true, I think there is a divide where a GenX or Older millennial may say "why would I want you to save my stuff to the cloud" Z and beyond are likely more in the "why wouldn't I save to the cloud?" or at the extreme "you can do something other than save to the cloud?"

And while I think this is to some degree "keeping with the times" MS clearly has ulterior motives to do this, to lock users into an ecosystem, to dangle premium services, to charge for storage etc.

I suspect the HN crowd leans towards pessimistic/jaded views and that like MS is mostly doing this for the other reasons and not to conform to the norms of a population that doesn't really use MS word.

The only reason the user got confused was because of the terrible fucking cloud-first save dialogs that they kept pushing. And all the different iterations of OneDrive that weren't the same thing.

It's also getting tiring seeing everything dumbed down for dumb people. I thought that people would learn how to use computers, and become empowered to integrate technology into their lives in the way that works for them. Instead, they have just become dumber than ever and more helpless and dependent.

But how will you figure out what to name a file without pumping it through Copilot!?

Maybe, but adding a setting for cloud/ local storage is not that complicated or even auto-save to local filesystem. Microsoft is just chasing the sales of “one drive” subscriptions.

Yes, they will probably make more money from OneDrive subscriptions but it will be will help and make things easier for 99% of their users (if not higher).

We have to understand that being on this website alone puts us in a group that is not "normal" (from the content of the site, to the UI, to the rules, etc). I think almost everyone here would agree backups are important but what is the "normal" Windows person supposed to do for that if not OneDrive?

External/NAS is out of reach of most people (to manage if not to buy) and it's local and you really want a cloud backup. And while it would be great if we all had e2e encrypted backups where we had the only key, that is just not going to work for most people. They will lose the key, want features (like search) that don't work unless you pull all the data local, want ease of use moving between multiple devices, or <insert 1000 other reasons>.

Yes, yes, I know _you_ (collective) know how to do that, I get that you can set it up for the friends and family in your life, but most people will not learn or put up with the limitations even if someone else manages it for them.

Honestly, a lot of people (both young and old) have no concept of where they are saving their files, I think saving to the cloud by default is the right call. I wouldn't save a document locally unless I knew one of my many backups would get it safely to the cloud in short order if not immediately. If only to cut down on support calls for myself I think this is a welcome change.

All that's changing here is the default, you can still save locally if you want. It's just another layer of training wheels on technology. As much as that chafes people on this website, myself included often, I think it's 100% the right move. The side-effect of making more money from OneDrive is icing on the cake IMHO, not the cake itself.

But why?

The Chromebook user makes a doc, closes the lid, and finds their doc on their phone or web later.

Why wouldn't the Windows user get the same UX?

The expectation is that your data's available anywhere. Even linux users are going to want backups of their own choice so it's available anywhere.

Maybe the user has turned off internet connectivity to help himself to stop procrastinating on the web to help him get the document written.

I don't know why the concept of "files" isn't taught in school any more.

I'm happy saving my work to the cloud, as long as it isn't OneDrive.

Any cloud but that one.

> Honestly, a lot of people (both young and old) have no concept of where they are saving their files

Microsoft is working hard on this issue since Windows 95. They even push their braindead Documents, Pictures, Videos before anything else. Good luck finding your files when something goes wrong. Though, it is better than iOS or Android where files are second class citizens and working with them is a PITA.

> The expectation is that your data's available anywhere.

Then why it is not available ? Why can't i run a dotNet program from a network share ? Why i can see heic files shared in Teams, but my boss cannot open them ?

> I don't know why the concept of "files" isn't taught in school any more.

Because people who think, do not vote with the right party and, worse, they ask embarassing questions.