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 $6.99/month you could have both Office and unlimited storage.
Of course, some people decided to take Microsoft up on their offer and use that storage. After all, why not?
Fast forward one year. New post from Microsoft OneDrive team tells us this:
Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average.
Good job guys! 🙂 If I had possibility to use unlimited storage, I'd use it as well!
But somehow Microsoft doesn't like it..
We’re no longer planning to offer unlimited storage to Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscribers. Starting now, those subscriptions will include 1 TB of OneDrive storage.
...
Free OneDrive storage will decrease from 15 GB to 5 GB for all users, current and new.
So, now you know. "Unlimited" means "please, no more than 5 GB" in Microsoft-speak.
Apparently, the reason for stopping the unlimited storage is not due to "abuse" by some users, but rather as a drive to cut expenses of the company.
M$ will never admit that their business is taking a dip. Instead they shift they blame on someone else. They have also reduced storage for free users from 15 to 5 GB which squarely indicates that the company is under tough times.
Normally I'd say "hook, line and sinker!" - MS got everyone hooked on OneDrive, integrated it deep into Win8+ filesystem and later could make OneDrive more expensive. Since it's a royal pain in the butt to switch to any other cloud storage, users would probably pay up.
But reducing the storage space - that's a move nobody outside MS can understand, not even guys at The Register - and they usually are very good in explaining obscure corporate decisions.
Looks to me like M$ is making it a little bit easier for people to switch over to other cloud storage options like MediaFire (10Gb Free & 1Tb @ $4.99/mo) and Google Drive (15Gb Free & 100Gb @ 1.99/mo).
That's exactly what I'm using now. But there's also ever-so-famous Dropbox (2GB free, 1TB @ $9.99/mo) or Backblaze Unlimited Backup for (surprise!) unlimited storage @ $5/mo. 🙂 Let's wait and see what Microsoft does next, maybe this move will make more sense then.
Yeah, Dropbox does seem to be integrated into almost every productivity / cloud app these days.. I had a free Dropbox account at one time but moved to MediaFire and Google Drive after they appointed Condoleezza Rice to its board of directors...
got in touch with dropbox cause of uni, have my 80gb now for free and i am satisfied with it. way better than that expensive stuff!
Call me cheap but I generally dislike paying for stuff you can get for free.
So far, I haven't seen any reason to pay for cloud storage. If my GDrive ever approaches the limit, I'll just use my HTC phone promotion to get 50/100GB extra. 🙂