You’re Special

My Documents. Like “Start Menu” or “My Computer,” the word has become almost a metonym (or a stand-in) for the Microsoft Windows system as a whole. Introduced in the reinvented Windows 95, the special folder was intended as a place for the user to keep her documents. Never again would users complain “I don’t know where my document is!?” for now there would be MY DOCUMENTS. And it worked – well sort of.

The problem was that either programs had to be written intelligently enough as to direct users to save their files into this directory of directories, or the users themselves would have to understand about where My Documents lived, how to get there, and why they should bother. The former never really happened. Even Microsoft Word 2003 does not default to the user’s My Documents as the default saving location. However, Microsoft did such a good job plastering My Documents all over the Operating System and Open/Save dialogs, that users did indeed learn to respect Microsoft’s their My Documents.

Whose Documents?

However, what happened with the move to NT-based systems with Windows 2000 [NT 5] and Windows XP [NT 5.1] (Yes, I know there was an NT 4. Believe me, I spent years with it at work. I’m ignoring it because it’s really not relevant here) was a severe complication of the file structure. NT was developed as a Microsoft answer to UNIX/BSD/Linux (And as an evolution of VMS), which means it had to include a robust multi-user model in the OS. The file structure was now modified so that there was a root-level “Documents and Settings,” then a folder for each user, and then things like “My Documents,” “Desktop,” and the hidden but quite important “Application Data.”

Now there were many “My Documents” folders all over the user’s hard drive. With the same name the user might confuse them. So here Microsoft broke a major rule of UI design and changed the name depending on who was logged in. If I log as Nate, then in the Nate folder, there is “My Documents.” If I open the Victoria folder or the Bobbo folder, I see “Victoria’s Documents” and “Bobbo’s Documents” respectively. Of course, when they log in, they see what is appropriate to the user. This solution makes sense in theory but in practice it confuses the user to no end. After all the user is looking for “My Documents” and instead they find the same folder with all sorts of other names.

Mother*#%^in’ Library, people!

Fast forward a couple of years and Apple releases Mac OS X. Since they too are now subscribing to the UNIX tradition with multiple users and the whole nine yards, they too create folders with each user’s name and a folder for documents within that user’s folder. Each Mac user now has two folders under their name, “Documents” and “Library.” Documents is meant for the user’s files while Library is meant for files for the user that are kept by the Applications, like settings, plugins, databases, etc. Sounds good enough, except the developers refused to listen. After all, what’s the purpose of littering the user’s hard drive with folders bearing your name if you have to put them somewhere the user will never find them? If you open almost any Mac user’s Documents folder today, you will find a mixture of personal or user-created files and Application-created files. Microsoft User Data, Acrobat Data, eBooks, Widgets, Roxio Converted Items, etc. So now the decent solution that Apple was hoping to foster with both a Documents folder and a Library folder has been mostly undone by thoughtless or greedy developers (To be fair, of all the examples above, Roxio does give you the option to choose another location).

This has had such a serious effect that Tonya Engst, in an article written for .Mac on August 4, wrote:

You may wish to create a folder in your Documents folder, called “My Documents.” I did this because my software automatically put so many support items in Documents, I could hardly find my own stuff.

Yeah, it’s that bad. So much for Apple helping the user by setting aside a directory for them (You hear that developers? FOR THE USER!) Note: I would link to the afore-mentioned article by Tonya Engst, but since it is for .Mac, it is “protected” behind Apple’s pay wall. Sorry.

And Back to Windows…

It is now mid-2005 and Microsoft has just released the next version of Windows (now named “Vista”) as beta 1. This new version sees them removing the “My” from their file system structure. “My Documents” has now become “Documents.” Hmmm.