Microsoft won't let you close OneDrive on Windows until you explain yourself

Software developers / designers do not respect or value users' muscle memory they spent half a lifetime developing at all. Even in products which ostensibly do want their users to develop expertise without being advertisement driven, such as Excel, Powerpoint or Word. Imagine if cars worked the same way: Every time you bought a new car, the steering wheel, pedals and so on are shuffled around because "users learn to drive 0.01% faster according to a AB-tests" or whatever. Fuck everyone who already got their license I guess.

A great example of why you should be using environment variables and the proper system API calls to determine path locations, not hard coding them. But never let an opportunity to blame Microsoft for poor application code go to waste.

Sounds like your expectations are a bit low.

Imagine my surprise when I get an automated email from a customer Microsoft 365 tenant saying that I had shared content that violates their corporate policy.

No I hadn't.

Microsoft did. They hoovered up my content, shoved it into the customer's OneDrive, and then applied data loss prevention (DLP) policy. You know... to stop people sharing things through OneDrive they shouldn't be.

It's just unfathomable to me that we've all just rolled over and accepted this as normal. Literal dark patterns by every definition of the term designed to coerce and trick everyone in the world to store their data in Microsoft's cloud whether they choose to or not.

Secrets. Passwords. Source code. Classified documents. Private pictures of my family. Pictures of my naked children.

Sluuuuurp!

Got to meet those KPIs at any cost.

If anyone from Microsoft is lurking in this thread: THIS is how megacorporations end. This. You take a giant shit on your evangelists, your technical experts, then they'll jump ship. The other 99% of users don't matter. They really don't. They'll follow where the 1% go. This has played out over and over. It destroyed Digg. It destroyed Slashdot. It destroyed IBM. It will destroy Microsoft in time.

PS: Because of this incident I now refuse to store anything in any of the pre-defined folders like "Documents" or "Pictures". I keep everything in a separate folder hierarchy outside of my user profile because I can no longer trust my own personal computer to keep files where I put them.

If that doesn't work, maybe they will use more hostile methods of coercion. For example, they could make it a service that restarts every 5 minutes after you kill it. They could also prevent you from disabling the service.

So I closed it and when I need to look at the calendar now, I use my Macbook instead.

It's so infuriating how Windows is turning into a total shitshow lately.

Thank God for all of you free software types, or I'd have nothing to boot instead!

I barely have words to describe how much I hate this.

> It takes real effort to make Windows accept a No.

At work I open the task manager and just start assassinating processes left and right. I wish they'd give me administrator access so I could fix this thing permanently.

Apple still irks me, though. Boot Safari, go and download Chrome. Install it. Which isn't silent, and requires multiple manual steps. Boot Chrome.

"Do you really want to use Chrome? (paraphrasing) Keep using Safari (the default option) or Switch to Chrome"

You know the user didn't accidentally download and install and start Chrome. Don't fucking ask.

These are showing up more and more in macOS and iOS as well. Absolutely infuriating. UX designed by marketers.

Not just windows. People, especially in business, are not ready to deal with reality. See the whole "No means no" Debacle

To become Senior Product Managers. You can't advance your career without putting your mark on the product.

Your joke just reminded me of that.

  Some exec: "Why are people quitting OneDrive?"
  Some PM: "I don't know."
  Some exec: "We should do an exit poll."

  Some exec: "Why are people quittin OneDrive?"
  Some PM: "Those that answer say ____, but a lot of people don't answer the exit poll."
  Some exec: "We should force them to answer"
  Some PM: "Fine."

I've been wondering about that since the day I noticed that they include the Xbox app on the enterprise version of Windows 10 and 11.

It's interesting to note how different the experience of different users is. Makes me curious what part of the stack is causing such massively divergent outcomes. Graphics driver? Window manager? Distro defaults?

Tough issue to debug. I hope someone over at Valve is studying it so the Linux experience can become better for more people.

Something similar happened to my father-in-law. He called one day saying that every time he saved a file in Word, he couldn’t find it again later. It ended up being that either all his files were saving into OneDrive but the “Documents” shortcut in Explorer was the local directory, or vice versa. That was also my first experience with the god awful Save dialog in recent versions of Office.

You can’t just upend where something as critical as where someone’s files end up, especially not for non-technical users. It’s absurdly bad.

Using Linux nowadays is nothing like trying to use Linux 2 decades ago. Many common distros are easy to use and have intuitive, familiar interfaces. I haven't missed Windows a single time since making the switch.

https://windows95tips.com/

I've uninstalled OD on 100+ systems. It's always followed the pattern of other crapware; it goes away until the next major update.

For W11 the list is at Settings > Apps > Installed Apps.

Up until fairly recently in this list, OneDrive was one of the ones (like Edge) where the Uninstall button was greyed out even for administrative users.

To get rid of it required more extensive hacking than casual users would be expected to do.

In the latest Windows versions the Uninstall button for OneDrive is finally functional, but when you do uninstall it takes quite some time before there is any visible response to confirm your action. Unlike other items on the list which uninstall quite rapidly.

For W10 you click the entire banner of an App to get the Uninstall submenu, but for W11 the whole banner is no longer active and you click the 3-dot ellipsis "trail of poop" icon instead.

Regardless whether an app on the list is that directly uninstallable or not, you might still benefit from hitting the submenu on every single app to access its Advancd Options selection where you can then disable the app's ability to run in the background. Especially for apps which are absolutely no use to you at all, if you can't directly uninstall, at least inhibit the uselessness to the extent within reach.

That in itself is a huge accomplishment.

If yes:

  - prompted to submit 5 star review

  - prompted to submit an internal feedback form

Do your job and shut up; you’re a program.

Yeah. That and their employers, customer base, relatives, biz associates....

Only if you're trying to annoy your users as much as possible. Especially for something like a server, where presumably if the operator thinks Microsoft's help is required, they'll ask for it.

I’m going to guess that the intersection of people who actively close unneeded background programs, and the users who are willing to explore alternatives overlaps quite a bit. This seems like a really shortsighted decision on Microsoft’s part.

Besides, they're the only people making an OS that regularly needs to be restarted anyway.