[…] them. If they must save something, they save it to the desktop. If they can however, they try to bypass the file system altogether by opening files from within the email and then sending them without ever hitting the save […]

[…] Chrome ships as a one-click installer and when they say one-click they mean one-click. It’s as if someone at Google read Jeff Atwood’s rant about complex installation procedures. All you actually need to do is to accept the EULA but you do that on the download page before actually running the installer. Once you accept it, there are no further questions asked. The browser is downloaded and installed for you. The age old question of “where do you want to install this software” is skipped, which is probably a good thing considering the fact that most lusers completely bypass the file system. […]

Oh man! I noticed that history thing too. I’m like “go to somewebsitethatyounevervisited.com” and the immediately go into the address box history and start scrolling around. Then they look up, and say “how do I go there?”

Sigh…

My mom is often the same way. She will never correctly save documents. She is also weird in her web browsing. To remember sites she will either:

1) email the URL to herself and then just let it sit there in Thunderbird until she needs it again.
2) Depend on the drop down history to find it- she panics when someone clears her history.

For some reason she can never use bookmarks, even though I’ve explained them to her a number of times.

I do! I even sometimes imagine the little electron gun in the back of my CRT shooting particles onto the screen in slow motion. :)

But yes, Clarke’s Third Law stands nonetheless. Maybe this is why people insist on calling us “computer whiz” or “computer genius” – because we perform some incomprehensible arcane rituals to heal their magical blinkenlight boxes.

That’s because it is magic to them (Clarke’s Third Law). Just as you don’t think about how the monitor in front of you is actually displaying tiny dots of color.

I’ve noticed something very similar myself.

The other thing I’ve found curious with Outlook users is that most of them don’t know the difference between e-mail saved on the Exchange server and e-mail in personal folders on the computer. When the server is down they don’t understand why they can’t access online e-mail, and when their computer crashes they can’t figure out why they lost e-mail they had refused to backup on their computer. It’s all apparently supposed to be managed magically.

I’d agree 100% with your observations. I’d suggest it says something about backups too, not that users don’t do them because they don’t know how to or where the files are stored, but because they think if everything is in their email they’ll never lose it. Partially that is right I guess. Partially.

One place where I ran across often this was the same with web based mail on public university computers. Users would “open” the file from their webmail, rather than download it, they’d spend along time editing it (even hitting save all along). They’d forget to email it again, or assume it was saved so they could come back, log off and leave.

Unfortunately for them, the user profiles they logged in were temporary, except that “my docs” and their “desktop” folders were mapped to some network storage they all got. Since the document they’d edited wasn’t put in “my docs”, it stayed in that hidden temporary folder for IE (local settings\temporary internet files\content.ie5\WX56G\) and as such was never moved to their network storage.

Heh, interesting way to look at it.

Which would also explain why so many users completely do not care about backups – because they don’t really have a good grasp on how to manage a file system.

It’s really just call-by-reference versus call-by-value. You’re comfortable with a greater level of indirection and know that technology has limits. Many people don’t want to look beneath the covers.