Microsoft shook up the cloud storage market this week. Cloud storage providers have spent years trying to out-do each other by offering more storage capacity for free, and increasing the amount of cloud storage customers get for their money. Microsoft is taking capacity off the table as a factor by offering unlimited OneDrive cloud storage for Office 365 customers.
Granted, there is still a fee there by virtue of the Office 365 subscription. But, if you view the Office 365 subscription as a cost-effective means of getting Microsoft Office, it’s like getting unlimited cloud storage thrown in for free. If you view the Office 365 subscription as a means of buying OneDrive cloud storage, you get unlimited capacity for the same cost of buying 10TB of storage on Google Drive, and you get Microsoft Office for five separate users plus additional perks and benefits thrown in. No matter how you slice it, it’s a great deal!
I wrote about the new unlimited OneDrive storage in a blog post:
When 2014 began, cloud storage capacity was limited and could be costly. In April of this year, Microsoft expanded the default 20 GB of storage in its OneDrive service to 1 TB for Office 365 subscribers. At that time, I said that it was — for all intents and purposes — unlimited. Well, a mere four months later, Microsoft is dropping the 1 TB pretense and will now provide actual unlimited OneDrive storage for Office 365 customers.
When I wrote about the previous increase in OneDrive capacity, I predicted, “In the very near future, the capacity will cease to be a differentiating factor in choosing a cloud storage provider, and unlimited storage will simply be the de facto standard.” I knew that the move to unlimited storage was somewhat inevitable, but I thought that the “very near future” would be sometime in 2015.
In a post earlier this week on The OneDrive Blog, Microsoft announced, “Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost.” The post explains that the roll out will happen over the coming months, but Microsoft urges customers to go ahead and start filling up that 1 TB with all of your data in anticipation of the fact that the 1 TB ceiling will soon be a thing of the past.
When capacity itself — or the cost for cloud storage capacity — ceases to be a factor, services like OneDrive need to find other unique elements that set them apart from competing cloud storage offerings. Microsoft seems to be banking on the tight integration with the Windows operating system and Microsoft Office as a defining feature of OneDrive.
You can read more in the full article on TechRepublic: The sky is now the limit for Office 365 OneDrive cloud storage.
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