Could Microsoft’s OneDrive be the Worst Cloud Storage Option? It certainly isn’t the Best.

I imagine if you’ve been in the Microsoft eco-system—Office, Active Directory, SharePoint—for any length of time, OneDrive may be a welcome addition to your productivity toolkit. If, on the other hand, you migrate to OneDrive from another one of the major cloud services, you’re in for a jarring experience.

In my case, it was email that drove me to OneDrive. More specifically, migration from our own email server, with its constant maintenance hassles, to the hosted Office 365 product. Suddenly, email administration was a thing of the past. Users were lavished with 50Gb inboxes, calendars were synched across devices, and we stopped thinking about how our email worked; or didn’t.

Along with the email subscription, Microsoft threw in a terabyte of storage, in the form of OneDrive. Wait, for the same $7 a month I’m paying for email I can have 1Tb of cloud storage? Sign me up.

Well, it turns out that OneDrive is not quite like DropBox or Google Drive, or likely any other cloud storage service for that matter. Somewhere deep in the OneDrive code-base lays the dreaded spirit of SharePoint. Don’t ask me where, I’m not a developer, but I see references to SP pop up as I’m saving files and going about my business.

The three most annoying behaviors of OneDrive for me (I had to pare down the list), are:

·       Office apps take forever to save to the OneDrive directory, with countless pop-ups.

·       You can never count on files to be synched between devices, sometimes for days.

·       The UI is practically meaningless, you’ll see files linger in the queue even after they’re synched.

Contrast these behaviors with any of the majors, and you’ll see how badly OneDrive fares. I get that there’s a “flywheel effect” around MSFT products, that once you’re on the platform it’s hard to leave. On the other hand, one has to ask who’s taking responsibility for this abomination at the company? Who are the people behind the lousy code, and why is no-one being held accountable?