Microsoft's Euro-mandated File Explorer surgery shows 'less is more' is still a thing

Opinion Windows File Explorer doesn't get much love, poor thing. It gets sworn at if a sought file cannot be found, or if some setting is hiding that needs to be shown.

Mostly, it's the caretaker that lets you ride hard on that most essential data exchange component, the Downloads directory, or that part of the workflow where stuff is moved, tidied, or swept away.

It's in the class of utilities that most Windows users barely notice, but if deleted would at some point stop play. Whatever the invisible magic is that keeps a day at the desktop truly productive, File Explorer has it. It always has, since it started life nearly 30 years ago as Windows Explorer, gently morphing to match its changing environment.

What it has never been is the focus of the privacy prefects. Until now.

That gentle morphing encompassed Microsoft's new appetite to map usage across applications and services, adding Entra ID footprints to places like Favorites, Suggestions, and Recent. But the EU data protection squad deemed this potentially dangerous, as for all its shy charms File Explorer doesn't know when such stuff is confidential. Out these features go.

Specifically, in order to comply with EU rules, Microsoft disabled account-based content in File Explorer in the Windows 11 24H2 preview build, which was released to the Dev and Beta channels this week. The change applies to Entra IDs in the European Economic Area (EEA) and will affect Recent, Favorites, Details Pane, and Recommended content.

Why is everything so quiet?

Has userland risen up in outrage over such "Eurowoke" overreach? Has Microsoft called for drone strikes on the pets and bicycles of those responsible? All is quiet. A rule of software development is that no matter how obscure, outdated, or redundant a feature might be, someone will be upset if you touch it. Users are weird like that. Yet it seems the simplification side effect of the pruning is not unwelcome.

This is far more radical than it looks. "Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler," Einstein (maybe) said. "Make things as simple as possible, then ladle on marketing roadmap revenue leeches, corporate whims, and the strategic refocus of the day," replied every tech company ever. This universal imperative results in something that people originally found useful, engaging, even lovely, becoming a bloated mess of misery that's a parody of why it was good in the first place.

There's a word for this, recently coined by Cory Doctorow: enshittification. It's a good and needed word for an abiding but unclassified affliction of the IT industry, and others, but it suffers from being a bit rude. That gives those we should be beating over the head with it an excuse to ignore it on principles of prudishness and taste. Let's use Elvis-ification.

It's not nostalgia to want to strip away all the system cruft that interrupts your search for the right utility with things you don't want, and if you did, you could find it in five seconds. Complex, unparseable licensing, and pricing options? Go away. Advertising in the taskbar? Oh please. Apps you don't trust but won't go away, AI you can't trust but can't turn off, go and do thou likewise. Every revision, more and more.

All these believe the industry's one great promise, to make you more productive. There are a lot of great things happening, but Elvis-ification awaits many of them too. What on earth does a Suggestions option mean in File Explorer? In your phone's contact list? The more basic and essential something is, the more it attracts the sequined bloat.

This process is common across human affairs, where the success of something simple and useful is a beautiful thing begging to be exploited by the bad. Political parties, corporations based on one good idea, film, books, and, most aptly, music.

But fixing humans is hard. Fortunately, tech is more malleable. Elvis-ification is a market opportunity, a bad thing to be optimized away in the name of, y'know, productivity.

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Windows 11 is notably otiose. It has no reason to be, and the market reflects that. If it came with a radically de-Elvisified environment, though, an option that sheds all that clogs rather than speeds workflow. Simpler, faster, easier to use and administer, and more productive? That's a reason to upgrade. It's even a perfectly normal marketing practice, to launch a new thing to fix problems without mentioning that it was the old thing, perfect at the time, causing the problems in the first place. Still too porcupine a pill for Microsoft to swallow, not while it can march Windows 10 off the end-of-life plank.

Without getting too Year Of The Linux Desktop about it, this leaves the Elvis-ification of the Windows environment as an achievable way back under the carapace of Redmond's enterprise lock-in spider crab. Don't replace the whole of the OS, just the user-facing stuff. If you can demonstrate proper productivity benefits, game on. It may have seemed impossible, but times have changed. The stuff that needs fixing has got worse, the tools for creating, testing, and gluing in big chunks of UI and utility functionality across platforms have got better. Making money from that into the future without taking the wrong path, well, that's worth innovating too.

As File Explorer will testify, it's time Elvis left the building. ®