A small victory for common sense at Microsoft

Todd Bishop in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that in the next version of the Windows operating system the names of various standard folders, such as “My Documents” and “My Music,” will be changed to simply “Documents” and “Music.”

This is good news, and follows my own practice. As soon as I learned the ropes of Windows 98 when I got my Dell computer back in 1998, I changed the name of the “My Documents” folder to “Documents” and of “My Computer” to “Computer.” I thought that the “My” was ridiculous and childish, and also implied a whole philosophy of personalism which I didn’t like (and which Microsoft took over the top in 2000 with the operating system named “Windows Me,” which fortunately didn’t sell well and was on the market for only one year).

The name My Documents also makes conversation about computers awkward. For example, if you are giving advice to someone about his computer, you have to say, “Now look in My Documents.” But of course you’re talking about his documents, not your documents. So the alternative is to say, “Now look in the My Documents folder,” which is also awkward. But if you change the name of the folder from My Documents to Documents, then you can just say, “Now look in your Documents folder,” or, “Now look in the Documents folder,” and the world makes sense again.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 31, 2005 08:27 AM | Send