Microsoft OneDrive Storage Plan Changes

Murasama
Due to some users who may have knowingly or unknowingly taken advantage of Microsoft’s previous “unlimited” cloud storage, the company has now made some rather sweeping changes to its OneCloud storage plans.

Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average. Instead of focusing on extreme backup scenarios, we want to remain focused on delivering high-value productivity and collaboration experiences that benefit the majority of OneDrive users. 

Here are the changes:
  • We’re no longer planning to offer unlimited storage to Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscribers. Starting now, those subscriptions will include 1 TB of OneDrive storage.
  • 100 GB and 200 GB paid plans are going away as an option for new users and will be replaced with a 50 GB plan for $1.99 per month in early 2016.
  • Free OneDrive storage will decrease from 15 GB to 5 GB for all users, current and new. The 15 GB camera roll storage bonus will also be discontinued. These changes will start rolling out in early 2016.
This essentially brings the low free end limit in-line with what Apple offers for iCloud while drastically reducing the total amount of cloud storage at the upper end (from unlimited to 1 TB).

And this is the thing with using the UNLIMITED moniker as a means to draw in customers.  There will be those few who ruin it for everyone else.  Likewise, there may be those other folks who just setup things to automatically back their entire system to the cloud, and thus end up creating the same issue for the company offering the service.

This happened back in the early days with web hosting where companies would offer unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth.  Guess what?  Some customers naturally took liberties with that forcing those companies to institute actual manageable and realistic limits.

To put it frankly, the original OneDrive plans should have been seen by Microsoft executives as being unrealistic.  Storage costs per gigabyte is cheap.  Bandwidth per gigabyte is much higher.  Couple that with unlimited, and the above was going to be inevitable.

Amazon is going to end up having this same issue with their $60 “Unlimited Everything” cloud storage plan.  They do have in their Cloud Drive Terms of Use the following though:

3.2 Usage Restrictions and Limits. The Service is offered in the United States. We may restrict access from other locations. There may be limits on the types of content you can store and share using the Service, such as file types we don’t support, and on the number or type of devices you can use to access the Service. We may impose other restrictions on use of the Service.

So yes, all it’s going to take is users who end up storing 100+TB of files on Amazon Cloud Drive to get them to also end up backtracking like Microsoft.

And this is one of the primary reasons why I’ve been cautious with embracing the cloud.  With Apple’s iCloud, it’s been about reliability and observing how Apple deals with service related issues as well as not constantly changing things like the way they did with iTools, .Mac, and MobileMe (they have a lot to prove to me they can manage web/cloud services over the long haul).

For everyone else, it’s also that plus their plan structure.  It’s sort of why I’ve stuck with DropBox (for use as a transfer medium only) because their limits were always not outrageous and clearly realistic.  I have a 30GB OneDrive (a limited time promotional where it gave double the free amount of space which will end up reverting to this new 5GB amount next year) that I’m using a whopping 64MB of.

The takeaway is this.  Offer a large amount of free anything, and there will be some folks who will take great liberties to the point where it is abused.  Nothing is really free though since someone has to pay for it.  And that has always been my adage; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Disclaimer: I am long both AAPL and MSFT

Related Posts

Leave a Reply