In a move that could redefine how millions work, Microsoft is steering Word users toward the cloud, sparking debates over convenience, control, and the future of local storage.
Microsoft Word logo in Windows 11 Search. Word and OneDrive just got a lot closer. (Image credit: Windows Central) Microsoft held a special OneDrive and Copilot event today where it announced a number of new features for the cloud-storage service. Buried in the announcements is one change that Microsoft is soon making to Word that might ruffle some feathers among those who are still pushing back against OneDrive and the cloud.
“Starting today, new documents in Word desktop on Windows (Insiders) now save directly to OneDrive, with autosave enabled,” says Microsoft. This means that creating new documents in Word in the future will automatically save said documents to your OneDrive storage, with autosave enabled from the get-go.
The change is designed to make it easier for users to back up and access their documents across devices, but some might find Word attempting to automatically upload documents to the cloud by default to be a privacy concern. Many will likely not even notice that Word’s behavior has changed, as the entire saving and backup process is automatic.
Isn’t onedrive a paid feature? What if you don’t pay for it?
If it’s like Google, they give you a seemingly generous amount of storage for free. Then they causally switch where you are saving everything to their cloud (one drive, Google drive) and then, if they have done their math right, a few years later you start getting polite prompts to upgrade your storage so you don’t lose all your stuff. Usually by then you are invested enough that spending the time pulling everything back from there and storing it locally seems hardly worth the effort when it only costs $3 a month or whatever to quadruple your storage and kick the can down the road.
Rince and repeat
Apple does the same with icloud storage-many apps use the space to back up their data.
Google does the same with gmail and Google drive- your emails fill the space in your cloud.
If anything, MS are behind on this particular enshittification