Comment by 9x39

I see it as a natural progression of something that's been going on for a decade -

1. They sell Office w/ OneDrive plans, and push online-first work through corp and home plans alike.

2. They have become progressively more opinionated over the Windows ux in the last decade. Updates mandated, security agent coming installed, Secure Boot by default, drive encryption by default, etc just like corp fleets do as a standard.

Files are the logical progression, if you squint here - MS is the user's administrator, since Windows arguably needs a sysadmin to make it usable. This is.. not new in the corp model: messing with the filesystem or linking to remote file systems has happened since the bad old days:

-remote shares

-roaming profiles

-folder redirection

-OneDrive known folder move

I think this is the click of the ratchet, as Windows continues to take ownership of its OS back from its users, bit by bit.

One problem with just relying on the native filesystem is that while SSDs are tremendously reliable these days such that they make mechanicals look laughably flaky, any FS can get corrupted, and with encryption by default, you're usually leaving users up a creek.

Anyway, the Microsoft view, best I can tell, is that a PC should be more like a phone - an appliance, managed by the vendor. They know the filesystem is a great solution - their filesystem, not yours. If you use their PC with an online account, it sort of works like that. If you try to hold on to ownership, non-tech users usually end up mishandling the sharp edges at some point.