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310 points speckx | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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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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neuralRiot ◴[] No.45044996[source]
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.
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1. joshstrange ◴[] No.45045589[source]
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.

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2. hulitu ◴[] No.45062616[source]
> 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.