GoKawiilI’d like to tell the story of job I just completed for a customer, so that I can make a point about how I feel Microsoft and other large technology companies are actively hostile to their users.
The Story
I received a call from my neighbour asking if I would be willing to help her husband with an issue he’d been having with his laptop. As the proud new owner of my own IT services company, I of course agreed to take a look.
I spoke with my neighbour’s husband, and immediately saw that he was not tech literate. I learned to identify the type while doing IT work for my previous employer. This made understanding his problem difficult, but through conversation we did manage to come to an understanding about what the real issue was that he was experiencing.
What he was seeing was that he was no longer receiving email in Outlook, and that there was an error message claiming he had ‘run out of available storage’, or some other similar nonsense. He is a very light email user, and he knows it. He was confused as to why he’d run out of storage. I was confused as well, at first.
Through investigation I discovered that the Outlook email service uses Onedrive for storage of all messages and attachments. He had 5 GB of available storage, the amount that is given with his free account. This had yet to explain why he was seeing that error message, there was no way he had consumed 5 GB of storage with just his email use.
Unsurprisingly, his Onedrive storage wasn’t filled by his email, it was filled by the personal files from his Windows 11 desktop. Did he configure Windows to save those files to his Onedrive directory, instead of his local home directory? Of course not, that was done by default. Did he even know that this was happening? Also, no. He had no idea this was happening until he saw that error message, which oh-so-helpfully offered to ‘solve’ his problem by offering him a subscription to additional paid storage capacity on the account.
He did manage to loosely understand what was happening, enough at least to start deleting files from his computer to try and make the error message go away. I was never able to confirm with him, but I suspect that he deleted files (including family photos) for which he had no other backup.
I will be blunt, this infuriates me. This wasn’t the first time I’ve seen this. I saw it many times while working for my previous employer. Microsoft has intentionally broken a fundamental assumption about how files are stored on a computer running Windows. They do this without asking the user, and without adequately explaining what they have done. Microsoft is very obviously employing dark patterns in order to goad its users into paying for Onedrive storage.
I’m a computer nerd, and if you are reading this you probably are as well. We can change that setting ourselves without much thought, and we probably have backups of our important data in case recovery is necessary. I will tell you that many people are extremely utilitarian about their computer use. They use their computers only to the degree that they must to serve their other interests in life. They also trust that their property, the device that cost them hundreds of dollars isn’t trying to cheat them like some back-alley con artist.
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