Just to set this up, I'm writing this on Blogger, which, when you write a post, you do within an actual editing environment, in which it happens that 'save' and 'publish' are (correctly) two different things, but if you want to see what the actual post looks like, you have to 'preview' it, which opens up a completely different tab to the Blogger reader interface, which of course doesn't have a way to save or publish the post, which you have to do back in the editing space.
I assume these things are designed by groups broken up into teams. One team is responsible for the editing space, another for the previewing space, another for the publishing (or 'make public') space. The worst case is when there is one team that does 'publish' that everyone else is supposed to provide a button to click on, but the different groups put it in a different place. One at the upper right, one at the upper left, one hidden in a pulldown menu, one hidden under a menu hidden under a separate tab...
If you work for a large organization, like a university, the systems you actually use are usually purchased by administrators (who increasingly fail to be academics having ever run a course before, let alone coordinated several different kinds of courses) without any consultation with on-the-ground users.
So within a product, let's say a Learning Management System, you fall for a sales pitch that involves a whole lot of good ideas (look you can manage gradesheets! look, you can let students see exactly what's happening with their grades! look can make general announcements to the whole class! look you can provide actual information, like instructions on assignments, to the whole class) that are implemented differently by the diffferent teams actually building the front ends.
So for instance, to make an 'announcement' you have to click to go to the announcements tool, which opens a new tab/page. You type in some kind of headline into one box, and the announcement into another, and then to actually make the announcement, the announcement tab gives you a menu to pulldown to select 'make public' or something like that. Which is fine for an announcement like 'class is cancelled on thursday' or 'there's a typo on page 152 I wanted to point out'.
For more substantive things, you don't make an announcement, you add a 'content'. A content is like an announcement, in that it involves general information for everyone, but is usually longer and more detailed. It's also put somewhere else within the course page in the LMS, and does not automatically generate a useful announcement, like 'hey everybody, I've added a 'content' that you really want to pay attention to')
Another random difference between an 'announcement' and a 'content', is that you save a content by clicking a button at the top left of the content-building page, and you make it public by choosing something from a pop-up menu located at the bottom right of the page. To be clear, these are both reasonable things to do separately (although frankly 'make public' should always automatically generate a 'save'). But the point is that the two tools have different 'make public' procedures, and only one allows you to save something without making it public.
I assume this is due to different functions being designed and implemented by different teams (and at different times) without having an overall 'interface experience' manager to keep track of everything and make suggestions.
I imagine some scenario such as the following leads to this kind of situation. MacroFirm produces a suite of products. One does document editing. One does spreadsheets. One does document design (which is different from document editing), and one provides the user with a database-style inteface. Each product/function is assigned to a different team.
The document editing poeple create 'new' 'open' 'save' and save as' commands, that can be accessed by a row of buttons at the top of the tool. Your spreadsheet people have similar functions, but for whatever reason (perhaps they don't want to clutter the interface), put them in a menu. Your document design people have similar commands, but for reasons of their own put them into a command window that you bring up by clicking on something else. And your spreadsheet people cannot imagine a situaiotn where you would put something to a database and not want to save it, so they do away with 'save' altogether and just have everything written to the database in real time.
Fortunately, you are MacroFirm, and you're smart enough to know that your users are probably all going to use more than one of these products, and would really prefer a consistent interface. So you set up a new time to devise said interface and then send down an edict to all the other teams that From Now On all our products will make use of the general interface. Including the same keyboard shortcuts and so on.
Now Macroform is fortunate in that The World has already come up with a preferred interface, these being the 'file menu', S for save, N for new, etc. So no reinventing the wheel there. But then you discover (or decide) that no one wants a 'file' menu separate from an 'edit' menu, etc., so you shove them all into a ribbon. And just because you know not everyone will want to clutter the interface with a ribbon, you make the ribbon hideable, and create a 'toolbar' where your favorite actions, like open and save, can just sit. And your user can control where the toolbar sits, and what is on it.
What you can't do, apparently, is create a system where a general toolbar exists across all your products. So the default toolbar for your document editor as new, open, save, undo, redo, and print, as defaults in that order. Your spreadsheeting product has new and open, but not print (because who routinely prints entire spreadsheets, and moreover does so often enough to having the button sitting and staring at them 100% of the time.
Your database people, knowing that no one actually wants to save anything, continues its practice of automagic real-time saving, doesn't put 'save' or 'save as' (or for that matter any of the others) in the tool bar. Fine.
Except your end user, dammit, wants 'new', 'open', 'save', 'save as' and 'print' in that order, more than they want undo (with or without redo) or any number of other commands in their toolbar. And by the way, since neither the ribbon nor the toolbar can ever show you all of the available functions, you still
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