As I went to sleep last night my intention was to proceed with my normal routine the following morning. Instead, I looked at my phone when I woke up and, as if the universe knew that I had spent the better part of the night previously working to reclaim my laptop from the clutches of doom - hyperbole ? Nah… Win 11 is diabolical. I noticed a stealthy message from a friend. Though I hesitated… I opened it.
I can’t actually directly share the link with you here because, as I wrote in Rat-Race-as-a-Service my previous messaging App Signal, decided without warning or dependency check, to deprecate me. And by me I mean my still quite functional laptop and the tombstoned OS it is running. Tombstoned perhaps, but still operational and unlike Microsoft who somehow decided to EOL my OneNote by making it read-only, I still can open/save/edit files on this system. Though I cannot install OneDrive, the subject of today’s post.
What my friends shared video from youtube pointed out is that Microsoft in their infinite hubris and cavalier ‘we say so’ attitude has decided to scan your OneDrive for people. What?! You exclaim… did they learn nothing from the uproar people made about Apple trying to do the same thing? That is rhetorical. Remember, Microsoft does not care. Nor is Microsoft likely to go head-to-head with governments who demand security back-doors into your cloud files as Apple did. Not hardly, remember, these are their customers - not you. Even if you misguidedly thought that ‘clicking’ over your hard-earned-duckets constituted you as a customer worthy their consideration … you see where this is going.
Which brings us back to rescuing myself from Win 11. I can already see your eye rolls and you shaking your hands saying “What did you think!?!?” You’re right. I tried though, really. I was fine on Win 10, after all I did fork over real money, not gratis upgrades, or discounted downloads for actual installation media. I see that… but wait. When Win11 came out it did so quietly… like the Trojan Horse that it has become. Microsoft tipped their hat when it leaked that they were ‘considering’ OSaaS (yes another annoying acronym but hey, this is a stack about technology. Anyways, so their leak (or unintentionally intentional market sentiment analysis fake news story) hinted to their intention.
Soon thereafter, they decided to start forcibly upgrading their apps to ‘online’ versions of O365, M365 - only. That is, unless you were an Enterprise customer. Okay, so now you should see the pattern here… if not, let me put a blinking light on the message.
*blinky blinky ‘You are not their customer’ blinky blinky*
So, I spent most of that day repatriating my data ensuring locally and then replicating that internally. Once I felt comfortable I ‘had’ all my electrons in order. I purged all my data from OneDrive. Microsoft won’t notice, nor will they care, but that isn’t the point. I do. I am still working on exfiltrating myself from the outlo
ok.com email I was using. In doing so I found out that switching your primary email for your MSFT account away from an outlook.com address breaks your outlook.com email. I am not attributing this to any nefarious incestuous coordination amongst internal PMs at MSFT. No, no. This is more likely a case of good old-fashioned product hubris.