Inside the new Files On-Demand Experience on macOS

LuciferMorningStar I think at this point in the game an apology is warranted, but it needn't have been at the beginning.  Everyone has software releases that don't meet user expectations. Especially when the impetus for it is "the folks who make the underlying OS did unexpected things and didn't give us enough time to react". "Mistakes were made" doesn't necessarily imply contrition, merely an acknowledgement that existing processes failed to fully capture user requirements, resulting in a high-friction release.

Unfortunately, Microsoft's corporate culture does not allow for these types of acknowledgements. It doesn't even really allow for acknowledging that user concerns are valid. And that's really the problem; the doctrine that extant processes are above reproach, and as a result that customer concerns must be the result of customer inadequacy, rather than process or vision failures internal to Microsoft.

At some point before these releases go out, they should be run by people who say things like "wait, what the **** are you thinking"...and these people need to actually be listened to. Doing so, however, would require evolution of said corporate culture that has been out of Microsoft's reach for well over a decade.

At the end of the day, that is my chief concern here: whether or not the OneDrive team is allowed to (and cares to) undo the damage done to their product...customer-hostile design changes are regularly pushed out by Microsoft with near-zero user consultation or communication. When user consultation does happen, it's typically with office-bound "purchasing decision-makers" who work for their largest customers; a myopia our entire industry is riddled with.

Somewhere, under all of this, is a Strategic Goal to get as much of a customer's data and as many workloads into Azure as possible. All of this - all of this - is about nothing more than driving subscription revenue: the holy grail of pleasing Wall Street. Priorities set, teams trundle forward in an attempt to evolve their individual areas of responsibility to align with the company vision, and the end result is ignorance of real-world use cases that negatively affect millions - sometimes billions - of people.

Not because everyone involved is corrupt or totally soulless, but because Microsoft's entire corporate philosophy is based on the twin precepts of homogenizing how their customer base uses their software and services (in order to drive down support costs), and getting everyone into the cloud to drive subscription revenue. And the body corporate doesn't particularly care if we don't like it: we're hostages here. Locked in to the ecosystem and they know it. They can lose double-digit percentages of customers and still come out on top because they'll have driven support costs so low, and gotten so many over to a subscription model that the almighty shareholder value will still keep on growing.

So whilst it does feel good for us all to vent our spleens here at the OneDrive team for what we perceive to be callous design choices that have caused us distress, to some extent they are caught between a rock and a hard place here.

The problem is - and has been for years - that Microsoft does not have passionate advocates for the end user within the organization that have enough authority and clout to reign in the corporate monofocus on pleasing the rich people's feelings graph. When Wall Street is the primary consideration for your corporate strategy, customers inevitably suffer.

Even if the OneDrive team manage to resolve the issues with the specific release, the underlying culture that birthed the problem remains, and the goal that created this release - to make the cloud the default for everything so that none of us can ever live without Microsoft subscriptions - will persist. That is the issue that ultimately needs to be addressed...and almost certainly never will be.