I’ll make One guess.
“Starting today, new documents in Word desktop on Windows (Insiders) now save directly to OneDrive, with autosave enabled,”
Yeah.
Index it all and train our AI on it.
Sell all your data to the Christian corporate fascist dictatorship, so they can use it to wage psychological and economic warfare on a global scale.
I’d say for most, the autosave will come in handy. So many times there’s been a project and someone at the least minute freaks out over their document being gone
They could have easily implemented autosave and versioning on your local machine. They chose to gate it behind keeping your documents in the cloud for profit-motivated reasons.
Onedrive is Microsoft’s attempt to make Home Windows users a revenue source by making it a subscription service. This has been SOP in smart phones for a decade now.
Makes me wonder if there is something in the terms that allows them to use documents stored on onedrive to train AI. Adobe is doing the same bullshit and keeps pushing you to send PDFs as Adobe cloud links instead of directly attaching the file to an email. They’re doing everything they can to get your data on their servers.
We’re no longer the customer. We’re the product.
Most likely, there is. In very small print.
With a sign saying beware of the leopard?
I don’t think they bother with fine print anymore
You can disable the Outlook addon that nags you about Adobe cloud, btw. Small part of the puzzle, but it helps.
You know how many times I’ve had to tell someone that document they created and have been working on for days was never saved even once and can’t really be recovered?
Lemme guess, hundreds-to-thousands, also the people you’re telling it to have business degrees and $100K+ salaries?
$1000/hr billing rates yes. Maybe 10 ppl/year.
I really hope they are incredibly good at a very specific thing that has nothing to do with where tf are their files.
Indeed.
Presumably it’s selling snake oil and convincing people to trust them?
I remember this. From the 90’s.
Autosave has existed AND been the default so long that taking it for granted is now actually okay.
This is not related cloud storage or corporates spying on users. It’s just autosave. That’s all it takes.
Gotta save once first.
Once upon a time it was like that. I don’t remember which decade I saw that last.
well now you’ll have to instruct them on how to find anything they saved in onedrive
That’s what they changed. It’s saved to onedrive by default now.
Right, I’m saying that the users too incompetent to save a word doc will be incompetent to find the new save location
It matters not if you use Libre Office
Yup. Haven’t used Word in decades.
I love watching the world burn while I use Linux and LibreOffice.
LibreOffice is so refreshing after dealing with MSOffice’s bullshit and Google’s web-based solution.
I just wish work didn’t force me to take a front seat and interact with MS products anyway.
Wish M$ would just go full Sega and give Linux official multiplayer support. They suck giant Ds for making anticheat windows only.
I’m sure that won’t be an issue for anybody working with confidential, privileged or private information.
I would be shocked if this hasn’t had some set of controls to disable it in Group Policy for months now.
This is just rent seeking against Home users.
People with One Drive through corporate Azure sjbscriptions (rather than the free “you have a microsoft login” tier) already have fairly robust controls available for handling and securing private data. There’s even special Azure tiers for government work that are even further secured.
This is only going to impact home users and conpanies without strong IT teams. Which is an egregious amount of people, don’t get me wrong. It’s also a horrible anti-consumer move. But this isn’t “Microsoft fucks over their golden calf: business users”.
As a us organization you can choose between different MS cloud tiers. I know about 3, the basic tier for private customers, tier4 for large corporations and tier 5 for us gov and military organizations. My guess would be that it has something to do with which 3 letter agency can access your cloud data.
Meanwhile in LibreOffice-land…
You’ll have to take that up with my CTO.
Didn’t this already happen? I feel like it’s been the default for a long time now.
Libreoffice puts my docs where I tell it and they get synced to my other machines. Don’t understand why people store docs on other people’s computers. The business world is full of dumbarses leading dumbarses. You can’t tell them though.
Microsoft can’t seem to figure out sync, ever since Briefcase, if you involve multiple computers you invariably end up with more and more conflicting copies. It’s embarrassing.
Office itself is insanely bloated is a world with Markdown, open data formats, and easy access to scripting. They used some pretty unethical tactics to make OOXML a “standard” to stop governments from switching to an actual standard: ODF-based Libre Office.
I mean this softly, but I’m going to guess you haven’t used OneDrive recently, and haven’t used it where it’s been set up in a competent manner. The default settings absolutely are not conpetent, espiecally for how messy computers for personal use get.
My workplace uses OneDrive to sync a specific set of user profile folders so we approximate having profiles and files that follow us without everyone needing a personal folder on a network drive that mounts at login.
The only issues we’ve had are profiles auto-downloading too mant of peoples files and eating drives on shared machines (so you just have your meeting room computers wipe all profiles every reboot and schedule reboots nightly), and I’ve had some issues where OneNote hadn’t actually synced the notebook back to the cloud before I closed on one machine and opened on a different machine so I lost some notes.
Beyond that, it’s handled even situations where I have the same file open siniltaneously on multiple machines smoothly. Syncs between login on multiple machines take 3 minutes max, and I can force it faster if I really need by pausing and resuming the sync.
I’m sure there’s situations it’s still not suited for, like editing and syncing large monolithic files (think video files over 1GB a piece). It probably sucks big time on personal machines where you’re going to have a complete mess of every file type imaginable tossed in one big unorganized heap.
But configured correctly, for general business use, it can work very well.
I currently use it, and have largely mitigated issues in a similar way.
Here’s why it matters
I’m going to have to put together a script to block any instance of a headline that includes this phrase. It’s so fucking overused.
“Why does knowing where my Word documents are stored matter?” Hmmm… let me fucking think, assholes.
- Here’s why it matters
- Here’s why you should care
- Here’s what experts have to say
- X happened, here’s what that means for the future
It’s like they feel the need to remind us what the purpose of an article is
You’d be surprised how many people actually need that. My boss is one of them and I constantly have to explain to him why shit like this is bad for us. We’re currently in the process of upgrading all our PCs to Windows 11 and I’m trying to convince him to let me install Linux on all the computers that don’t meet the hardware requirements. Fortunately we use an older version of Microsoft Office that doesn’t come with all the bullshit, but there will eventually be a day where we will have to “upgrade” that too. And because of this, I’m also trying to convince him to switch to something like LibreOffice.
Uploading all of our shit to OneDrive is not only a bad idea because we have our own secure servers in house, but it’s also a bad idea because we deal with a lot of files that could get us sued if it was leaked online. We don’t even let our servers connect to the internet for that very purpose. And it’s not a matter of if, but when windows starts uploading all of our shit to OneDrive it will be a complete disaster. And I’m sure there are a lot of guys doing IT at various other companies all trying to explain to their boss the same thing I am while they ignore the issue.
I’ve worked in business IT before, so I have a (very small) bit of background I can probably share from your bosses side.
If you’re not recommending a distro that has a support contract (e.g. Red Hat), what you’re creating is a bus situation - if you get hit by a bus, who is going to maintain the Linux terminals when they go down? Would that contract cover supporting LibreOffice? How will normal staff be able to figure out how to use Linux, and will there be a measurable increase in productivity from them, or will they be slow to adjust?
Regarding OneDrive (or more realistically, SharePoint and Microsoft 365), Microsoft has a service level agreement for this. I can’t read it on my phone because it’s in docx format, but I dare say that it does have some coverage for if data is leaked, otherwise most enterprises wouldn’t even touch it.
Your boss likely doesn’t have concern in that aspect because of the SLA assurance, and thus it makes more financial sense to move completely over to M365 and away from on premise servers that require constant maintenance, upkeep and power costs.
I’m not sure of the business size you’re in, but I’d hazard a guess that its a small business if your boss is in a position to potentially change out the existing IT infrastructure. You’re facing an uphill battle in convincing your boss to move to Linux because the desktop support for it is limited and likely expensive, and the alternative is to keep you and probably hire other Linux technicians to maintain those Linux systems when they go down.
SLAMMED
" Word will now save new documents to OneDrive by default — and that changes everything"
Wouldn’t it be great if all your docs were stored out in the cloud? Just think, you wouldn’t need a hard drive! And someone else could guard them for you, like, say, Deputy Dan. http://descope.kwwhitaker.com/wallofscience.html
It doesn’t. Friends don’t let friends bring Microsoft home.
Only office and LibreOffice FTW!
Surely this is a minor problem with an easy solution: choose “Save As…” from the menu, then select a folder on your local drive.
My God, THANK YOU! I’ve seen this article in five different places and everyone is losing their minds over this, seemingly completely oblivious to the fact that:
- This ONLY affects people who are using OneDrive in the first place.
- It’s a setting that you can change any time.
- If you want to keep the default but have a specific file outside of OneDrive just - exactly like you said - click “Save As” and store it locally.
It’s mind boggling how much people switch off their brains whenever they see Microsoft doing literally anything, and the entire conversation devolves into “Microsoft bad”.
