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310 points speckx | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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yodon ◴[] No.45038582[source]
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.

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tsukikage ◴[] No.45039015[source]
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.

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avarun ◴[] No.45039772[source]
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.
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1. tsukikage ◴[] No.45040862[source]
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.