This nugget of information comes from the Coding Horror blog:

Take a look in your Documents folder right now. Go ahead. Look. Do you see any files or folders in there that you personally did not create? If so, you’ve been victimized. Applications should never create or modify anything in your documents folder without your permission. And yet, sadly, it happens all the time. Applications, and more specifically, the programmers who wrote those applications, think it’s perfectly A-OK to carpet bomb your personal user space with their junk.

Where applications should store their data is a confusing situation for the programmer. Especially when Microsoft seem to like changing the “standard” between Windows revisions. I can kind of see why most applications stuff it all in “My Documents” – there’s a fairly simple way to ask Windows for the location of that and it doesn’t require checking what version of Windows you’re using.

Can we stop with the “My” prefix on everything? It destroys file sorting, looks a mess and is as irritating as the “i” prefix on every Apple product and the “k” prefix on anything remotely to do with KDE.