From the Editor’s Desk: Reactive Change (Premium)

Earlier this summer, I wrote about a shift I made away from Sonos. Oddly, this change was unrelated to the easily avoidable problems the company brought on itself, problems I refer to collectively as Sonosgate, but the timing was interesting, if only for its coincidence. Indeed, there were so many coincidences to that event that it's difficult to keep track. But whatever, it all came to a head when it did, what happened is what happened, and I went down a path that I couldn't possibly have imagined just a few months earlier.

Me being me, this was accompanied by a lot of navel-gazing. I routinely engage in a practice I think of as triage, though that's not really the right word. It's more of a post-mortem, really. Something happens, or something ends. And I look back on it and think about how I might have handled it differently. Better.

A simple example: I try to travel as lightly as possible, and at the end of every trip, I unpack and separate the dirty clothes from those that went unused. That any clothes went unused is a defeat of a sort, since I carted those unused clothes to and from whatever destination, and didn't need to. These events all go into a vague mental tally and the next time I have to pack a bag for a trip, those collective experiences inform what I bring that time.

This isn't a skill I can perfect. It's highly likely that I reached some apex of light packing efficiency many years ago, and that every trip I've taken since is just some percentage more or less efficient than I've ever been. That is, I'm not going to get any better at this now, not after 35+ years of traveling as an adult. Despite this, I silently chide myself for carrying those unused clothes across the country or around the globe after every trip.

For better or worse, I approach personal technology the same way. I've written a lot about my need to constantly reevaluate the products and services I use with the aim of being open to something different if it's better. This is something I've always done, but this past year has been notable in that regard.

One year ago, I was among the first, if not the first, to point out that Microsoft had begun silently enabling OneDrive's Folder Backup feature in Windows 11, even after I had explicitly denied its requests to accept this change multiple times. In my role as canary in the Windows coalmine, I identified the behavior, explained what little you could do to prevent it, and then made a major change to how I stored personal information in OneDrive when the behavior escalated. But the cancer spread into Microsoft Office, which also badgered me about using OneDrive, and by the end of 2023, I had done the unthinkable. 30 years into my career covering Microsoft, I stopped using OneDrive. And I stopped using Microsoft Word. I had had enough.

When we were in Berlin for IFA recently, my wife at one point referred to the trip as "reactive travel." This was something that was foisted on us--Lenovo and...