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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 competit
by yodon 1y ago
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.
- stuaxo 1y agoTheir competitor is cloud native, so where else would it be stored? This is still a local app, so it doesn't feel like a natural default.
- mc32 1y agoIt should be the default for corp accounts. But even home users would benefit form seamless document retrieval (recovery). Corp users’s biggest IT headache is lost Word or Excel files.
- Zambyte 1y agoWeb applications (even those with interactive editing!) can store all data locally instead of remotely if desired. See Excalidraw for a nice example.
- clejack 1y agoWhile incompetence might be an issue, I think the greater problem is that Microsoft is rolling back control and generally sucks at UX. Why does this app that's been working just fine as desktop software need to save anything to the cloud by default? It's conceptually odd. I've used Google docs from the beginning, but I actively choose what docs I want on that platform. All MS had to do was add "save to cloud" as an additional save option along with "save" and "save as" (maybe renamed as "save to desktop") then auto save could activate where your last save location was. This would be good design.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- fragmede 1y agoWho's incompetence? When half their users need to ask "what's a cloud", that option is too complicated. What's sensible and reasonable and logical to us, isn't to the rest of the world.
- rekabis 1y ago> Microsoft is rolling back control Agreed. Functionality like this should be presented as a choice in an OOBE welcoming screen right after installation. And it should be _a choice,_ something that can be reversed at a later date if the decision was wrong.
- TechSquidTV 1y agoMicrosoft could announce that they've made kittens live forever and people would complain.
- kstrauser 1y agoMicrosoft: We’ve opted all users not on the Ultimate edition into the mandatory Kitten Soul Cage. Fans: You people will complain about everything!
- olddustytrail 1y agoThere must be a name for this fallacy. You know where it goes: Person/Company does crappy thing People complain Fanboy says "Person/Company could do amazing thing and people would still complain" ... when it's very obvious that company/person didn't do anything good. I've seen it so many times there must be a name for it. Anyone know what it is?
- technothrasher 1y agoIt's basically shooting the messenger, which is an ad hominem.
- olddustytrail 1y agoI'm not sure they're quite the same. If noone else has coined a term for it I'll go with the "cancer cure fallacy" but maybe someone has a better name. Open to suggestions!
- RichardCA 1y agoBegging the Question. Step 1: Assume your claim is already true, e.g. "Microsoft is a still good corporate actor in spite of doing X". Step 2: Manufacture circular logic to support your claim from Step 1. In other words, the poster is begging the question to be self-evident, rather than producing evidence to support their claim.
- layer8 1y agoI don’t think kittens living forever would work out well, if you think about it.
- tsukikage 1y agoOneDrive 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.
- msh 1y agoGoogle drive provides the exact same sync functionality.
- kelvinjps10 1y agoThey separate Google drive functionality from Google docs sync
- avarun 1y agoCRDTs 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.
- tsukikage 1y agoCRDTs 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.
- imtringued 1y agoThat sounds like an extreme amount of incompetence to me. I understand that you run into this problem with third party software like Dropbox, because they aren't natively integrated with the OS and therefore need to do some unreliable file tagging to support basic operations like renaming, moving or copying files, but Microsoft controls the entire OS. They can scan the filesystem journal for file system operations. They can build custom OneDrive specific features into their file explorer. They have an office suite that can directly integrate with OneDrive. Yet they chose to not do that and instead decided that they really ought to collect all your data for training AI instead.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago>Somehow, Microsoft managed to make the same feature sound and feel and be creepy. The company they're imitating (poorly, as always) is one I've found so creepy that I actively go out of my way to distance myself from. For at least the last decade at this point. If Microsoft is being creepy too, this just means they'e successfully imitated the competition... for once.
- Xelbair 1y agoIt's even simpler. People who wanted that kind of treatment and walled garden already moved to apple's ecosystem, and people who do not want this stayed with windows. Now more and more of my non-technical friends are moving towards linux because microsoft is pushing them away.
- 8fingerlouie 1y agoI think the main competitor for Microsoft Office is Google, which indeed defaults to saving documents in the cloud. Apple, as far as i know, still gives you a choice.
- p_ing 1y agoPages and the rest of the iWork suite save to iCloud by default. Both Apple and Microsoft give you the choice of where you want to save.
- ubermonkey 1y agoI've no idea what you mean by "walled garden" w/r/t MacOS, but I understand it's an article of faith on HN. Again, for the Nth time, you can run any software you like on a Mac. You can do anything you want. App store? Of course. Direct vendor download? You bet. Build from source? No problem. Further, this line is out of place here because Microsoft is FAR more invasive about pushing cloud-first storage than Apple has ever been. No app on my Mac default to saving to iCloud. NONE.
- Xelbair 1y agoYou can do whatever you want inside the garden, but moving away from it is becoming increasingly harder and harder - hence walled garden. you can't bring your software with you, you can't bring your licenses with you, and all services are available only inside it.
- doublerabbit 1y agoNot sure why you're being downvoted but this is exactly it. You're forced by what's given to you and can only use within the garden on only the device you own.