I don't really agree with it not being confusing. Offline mode should be the default behavior of Onedrive when nobody is logged in because if nobody is logged in there's probably nobody wanting to use the service. Having to log into the service to tell it "I don't want to use you" is stupid.

If there was a news site spamming your email with clickbait articles and the only way to stop them from spamming your email is by logging into the news site to let them know you don't want their news you'd probably call that stupid. You should be able to stop their spamming without needing to log in.

It's not confusing when you just accept that you have to log into somewhere just to turn it off.

Just because it's not confusing to you, because you have access to additional context, doesn't mean it isn't intrinsically confusing.

What is written is essentially "go online to go offline".

I frequently ask my people to shout out thier ideas to brainstorm. "The first idea will be the worst. We'll iterate on it. Let's get the worst idea out quickly"

This message smacks of "the first, worst, idea"

I'll propose a second idea:

"Sign in to decrypt offline files"

Is it good? Still no. Is it better? Probably. What would you propose as a third iteration?

Not confusing at all ? what about the double negation... "turn on offline mode" sounds like those boolean settings in some programs which turn something off when you set them to "on"...

When I was forced to download steam after I bought empire total war only to find unlike previous games there was no physical disk, steam had to be downloaded, spied on you constantly, and drained your battery and cpu, and constantly made you ask for permission to use the game. You could play it offline but it would constantly give you error messages about needing to check online to play offline or something.

Point being, in that case the real purpose was to foil software pirating, video game developers are very aggressive in combating piracy, to the point of denying legitimate users the right to use their games, in effect justifying piracy of that particular game in my opinion.