Administrators can disable this, so I think the larger point is: if a tech literate person receives a zip file, they understand that it is in fact a compressed archive that can contain one or more files and directories, and that you need an archive tool to extract the contents, whereas a tech illiterate person doesn’t understand this and expects it to just be handled magically when they double click on it and are stumped when that doesn’t work.
Double clicking works for 99% of file types. So if I send you a pair of Excel files in a zip and you double click it under Windows 10 or 11, it will just show you the Excel files and you can even open them. Not sure what your point is here.
The point is that when the double click magic doesn’t work for one reason or another, for example because the administrator disabled this feature with a group policy or because the file associations got messed up, the tech illiterate person does not know what to do because they don’t grasp the underlying concept.
Administrators can disable this, so I think the larger point is: if a tech literate person receives a zip file, they understand that it is in fact a compressed archive that can contain one or more files and directories, and that you need an archive tool to extract the contents, whereas a tech illiterate person doesn’t understand this and expects it to just be handled magically when they double click on it and are stumped when that doesn’t work.
Double clicking works for 99% of file types. So if I send you a pair of Excel files in a zip and you double click it under Windows 10 or 11, it will just show you the Excel files and you can even open them. Not sure what your point is here.
You’re completely missing the point.
The point is that when the double click magic doesn’t work for one reason or another, for example because the administrator disabled this feature with a group policy or because the file associations got messed up, the tech illiterate person does not know what to do because they don’t grasp the underlying concept.