If your UX involves introspecting content to determine whether it is being misfiled, you're already doing something wrong. Such gimmicks work as 'syntactic suga

If your UX involves introspecting content to determine whether it is being misfiled, you're already doing something wrong. Such gimmicks work as 'syntactic sugar' (think google's "did you forget an attachment" message) but they shouldn't be the first the user sees of the feature (in goog's case, having an always-visible attachment icon.) If they absolutely want to go the idiotic route of public-by-default, a 'private'/'public switch might be too noisy; a 'create new document'/'create new private document' too redundant... Honestly, I don't see why they would want to go that route anyways. The model is practically handed to them on a silver platter; most users want to keep docs private, unless and until they wish to have a document pool for sharing (easy to build infrastructure for), explicitly share single docs (again, just add a 'share' button and people get it), or make it publically accessible (i.e. "post" or "publish" to a platform.) As I said in another comment here - everything gets explained away once you assume MS' incompetence in things. (I mean for god's sake, there are so many other solutions in this space that they have all the hard thinking be done for them!)