Is OneDrive Still the Place for Everything?

It appears that the tech giant Microsoft was guilty of being a little naive for jumping into the cloud storage wars head first with wild abandon by offering unlimited cloud storage and a free copy of Microsoft Office for only $7 a month last year. Maybe this was a case of good old-fashioned ego writing checks that the servers couldn't cash after breaking their promise of unlimited storage and dramatically changing their own rules in the process.

The more cautious Dropbox and Google provided only 1TB for a few dollars more so maybe Microsoft shouldn't have been too surprised when some OneDrive users decided to see how far they could push their unlimited storage limits. A OneDrive blog post revealed that in some instances this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average, but I wonder why its suddenly unusual for a percentage of customers to take full advantage of the ‘unlimited’ storage when it was advertised as being unlimited in the first place?

Offering a Windows 10 upgrade on the one hand while taking away with the other by reducing its free OneDrive storage from 15 GB to 5 GB, removing the 100 GB and 200 GB plans and replacing them with a new 50 GB plan for $1.99 a month has not gone down very well. Microsoft now looks like a politician that has promised its consumers the world only to leave a trail of broken promises behind.

Google and Amazon Prime continue to offer unlimited photo storage along with a generous free limit. Meanwhile, many tech-savvy consumers have snapped up reasonable storage limits on services such as Dropbox and the Box over the years, that ultimately leaves OneDrive looking completely irrelevant to non 365 subscribers.

It seems somewhat bizarre to highlight that one user who had taken advantage of the One Drive service being unlimited and who had 74TB in storage while deciding to punish the other mass of regular consumers by calling off the deal entirely. Many users who are now uninstalling OneDrive were already grumpy about the desperate pleas to upgrade their machine to Windows 10 every time they switched on their computers making this another kink in the armor of the increasingly out of touch software giant.

Just when Microsoft had started turning heads again with their new direction, it botched up, and customers will now struggle to trust any new service by the behemoth. Anyone who looked a little closer at the changes might have been pleasantly surprised at the olive branch offered to appease disgruntled customers.

"Users on the free plan will also be able to redeem a free one-year Office 365 subscription with 1TB of OneDrive storage, but will need a credit card to do so."

The requirement of a credit card to obtain a free one-year subscription is an excellent indication of Office 365 being the company’s number one priority and they are out now to secure as many subscribers as possible. Maybe Microsoft has decided to walk away from the needs of the average user and set its sights on shifting corporate customers to its Office 365 platform away from its arch-nemesis Google.

Rather than keeping up with the times Microsoft appears to be displaying a pattern of running around aimlessly only to be caught back-pedaling after yet another misstep. A mere one-year ago consumers were promised the dream of “One place for everything in your life". Once the fan fare settled down, little did we realize that the dream came with a limit of 5GB or less indicating a hint of arrogance on the part of the company for good measure?

I cannot help but think if punishing an entire customer base for the actions of a few is a wise choice for Microsoft? The strangest facet of this story is that they do not seem to be too bothered. So as many consumers now delete the app from their devices they will likely not be looking back either.

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