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310 points speckx | 7 comments | | HN request time: 0.552s | source | bottom
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Eric_WVGG ◴[] No.45040621[source]
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.

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1. 01HNNWZ0MV43FF ◴[] No.45040637[source]
You can have auto-save and automatic file naming without cloud storage
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2. cosmic_cheese ◴[] No.45041111[source]
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.

3. kayodelycaon ◴[] No.45041145[source]
Microsoft removed auto-save of local files from the Mac version years ago.
4. saratogacx ◴[] No.45044444[source]
But how will you figure out what to name a file without pumping it through Copilot!?
5. 9x39 ◴[] No.45046756[source]
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.

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6. hollerith ◴[] No.45046775[source]
Maybe the user has turned off internet connectivity to help himself to stop procrastinating on the web to help him get the document written.
7. hulitu ◴[] No.45062658[source]
> 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 ?