03 Nov 2015

“Unlimited storage” Microsoft-style

What do you think - how large is "unlimited storage"? To me, word "unlimited" means, well, unlimited. "All you can eat". No restrictions.

For a year, Microsoft was offering unlimited storage with their Office 365 package:

Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365. Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost. We’ve started rolling this out today to Office 365 Home, Personal, and University customers.

It was not a bad deal - for $6.99/month you could have both Office and unlimited storage.

Of course, some people decided to take Microsoft up on their offer and use that storage. After all, why not?

Fast forward one year. New post from Microsoft OneDrive team tells us this:

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.

Good job guys! smile If I had possibility to use unlimited storage, I'd use it as well!

But somehow Microsoft doesn't like it..

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.
...
Free OneDrive storage will decrease from 15 GB to 5 GB for all users, current and new.

So, now you know. "Unlimited" means "please, no more than 5 GB" in Microsoft-speak.