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.

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).

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.