My Opinion#
Regarding the incident of WPS allegedly locking local documents, in the absence of any solid evidence, my view is that it reflects a lack of technical capability at most, and subjective malicious intent should be ruled out. It should not escalate to the level of domestic word processing software. Below are two main points:
- "Domestic word processing software" can be criticized for its technical capabilities and stability, but it should not be labeled with subjective censorship content or interference with user creation.
- Damaging or losing user documents is not a unique "feature" of "domestic word processing software." Users should have an awareness of file backups and not overly rely on software, after all, software is written by people.
Firstly, the review and management of cloud files is an understandable behavior, as a single oversight combined with public sentiment could potentially ruin a company. However, WPS has no obligation to review local files; locking or deleting them is purely self-inflicted trouble. Considering user experience, there will inevitably be a lot of interaction between cloud files and associated local files, which users may not perceive as differences between the two files. Behind this is complex software logic. As a leading domestic word processing software, there should theoretically be no issues with the software logic, but considering the actual complexity, problems can completely arise, which is why I lean towards this being a technical capability issue.
Although there is no difference in the outcome, from the user's perspective, the word processing software lacks credibility. However, if we follow the supervisor's criticism, "domestic word processing software" could be directly killed for maliciously interfering with content creation. If we characterize it based on insufficient technical capability (assuming WPS indeed has cases of locking user local files), a careful analysis shows that this situation arises from the interaction process with cloud files. Choosing not to use cloud services and opting for offline versions for government and enterprise can solve the problem.
On the other hand, the "service" of file synchronization is really not that easy to do. Even Microsoft, with its strong capabilities, has issues with OneDrive synchronization that are not foolproof. A simple search can reveal similar problems, some even more severe than WPS "locking" files.
- https://answers.microsoft.com/zh-hans/msoffice/forum/all/onedrive 内文件突 /b1f4508d-f7b5-4b45-b3f5-24b2218782d0
- https://answers.microsoft.com/zh-hans/msoffice/forum/all/onedrive 桌面备份 /bc0c2f2d-0808-46cc-acaf-ef36fa99e004?page=2
As for the supervisor's point about the unacceptable consequences of content loss and impact on work progress due to software behavior, I believe it is necessary to consider providing the appropriate disaster recovery guarantees based on the importance of the documents, rather than hoping that the software will not make mistakes with every operation on the files and that the hard drive will never fail.
I feel that this output from the supervisor expresses dissatisfaction with censorship interfering with creation and concerns about serious consultation creation in the future, with WPS being the scapegoat. As an engineer with a bit of connection to software in China, although I think WPS is indeed lacking, I still hope it can survive well.
Supervisor's Reply#
As an engineer, you may be right.
As a Chinese person, you also know that certain issues exist beyond software.
As a user, there is no need to consider where the pressure comes from; just vote with your feet and money.