Having external backups set up correctly is pretty good for users, and I think that would justify trying to make it more of a default. This seems pretty obvious to me, but I expect if Microsoft did surveys they would find people complaining about how terrible losing a document or disk was for them in the past. I don’t know what ‘explicitly chosen not to use it’ means, but I think you or I would probably consider such an action to be more deliberate than the average user doing that (guess: trying to get rid of notification or reduce steps in install or just randomly clicking through screens is reasonably likely).
> I don’t know what ‘explicitly chosen not to use it’ means
This is the giveaway that you aren't saying anything in good faith.
> but I think you or I would probably consider such an action to be more deliberate than the average user doing that
Nice appeal to our superiority or whatever you want to call it, but this is irrelevant. The "average user" is no less deserving of the choice and naturally it's up to them to make the right one for them, not Microsoft.
Your whole argument is just diminishing the value of peoples consent.
I thought I must have been missing something so I reread the OP, but I still don’t get where one ‘explicitly choos[es] not to use it’?
For a new computer I think it looks something like:
1. Set up with your Microsoft account which you may need to create
2. Now, if you were already using onedrive, your files are synced from the internet. If you weren’t then the default contents (ie empty/trivial) are being synced.
I don’t really see that as the user making any explicit choice not to use onedrive and the default doesn’t seem very bad. It doesn’t feel terribly different from other defaults like windows defender or scanning for nearby WiFi networks.
But maybe there are alternatives that do feel more like the user making an explicit choice which the OS overriding that? Eg if you upgrade an existing installation or go through some ‘transfer from other computer’ process so that the directories being synced aren’t trivial. The OP didn’t mention such scenarios so I’m reading between the lines/guessing here.
Do you have some scenario where the user clicks some ‘don’t use onedrive’ button and has their choice overridden?
