OneDrive reduces free tier from 15GB to 5GB

[whoopdedo]

    We’re also no longer planning to offer unlimited storage to Office 365 Home,
    Personal, or University subscribers.

The real story. Now they're forcing already paying customers to double-dip. Home and Personal I can understand, but not being generous to students seems the opposite of how Microsoft has been in the past. I also don't see anything about how an Office 365 subscriber could buy extra storage. At least the 1TB limit is per-user.

[yuhong]

Storage is always limited, and it is unlikely that being more generous like this makes sense.

[kyriakos]

Offering unlimited space was a mistake from the start. Cutting down on their free tier though is a bad move.

I use OneDrive partly cause I got 5 licenses of Office along with it for my family - which is a steal considering what you get even if its 1TB and not unlimited. If you compare Office 365 Home pricing with the popular Dropbox for example you'll see its absolutely worth it. My concern though is what happens if MS decides to cut down from 1TB to 100GB next month...

[microtonal]

If you compare Office 365 Home pricing with the popular Dropbox for example you'll see its absolutely worth it.

I have both Office 365 and Dropbox Pro. But as online storage, they are really miles apart. The OneDrive client is flaky, slow, and does not do delta sync, the Dropbox client is pretty much the absolute opposite - fast, does delta sync, and LAN sync. Applications that upload through the OneDrive API (I use rclone and Arq) often fail with API errors.

In the end, you cannot simply compare prices. Office 365 is great if you need Microsoft Office, the OneDrive storage and Skype minutes are the cherries on top. But if you need to move significant amounts of data, Dropbox Pro is a steal at $9.99 per month compared to Office 365.

[frik]

They are so backwards. First the reduce it from unlimited to to 15GB. And now to 5GB. And blame it on the user. Way to go. End users are completely knocked down and are questioning cloud services.

And Win10 with its spying, so nice to the end user. No wonder their brands are burned, the global market share of WinPhone fall to 1.1% in Q4 2015. So sad, because the products were damn fine until Satya Nadella (and Bill Gates in the background) took over from Steve Balmer.

[stephenr]

> End users are completely knocked down and are questioning cloud services.

End users should be questioning any "cloud" service that has unlimited data storage.

[spriggan3]

> We overcommitted with our free storage limits and we want to focus on delivering high-value productivity and collaboration experiences that benefit the majority of our users.

I wonder if Google will also downsize its free tier. I also wonder if there is a real business in cloud hosting. I doesn't seem like Dropbox is doing well either.

[microtonal]

Cloud hosting can be a real business, since it solves a real problem. The problem is that Microsoft/Google/etc. sell storage with little profit or even underpriced to grab market share as quickly as possible.

Maybe they are figuring out by now that the vast majority of the people who fall for free/cheap cloud storage will never pay up. The real money is in business customers who are not data hoarders, but pay 10 dollar per month per user for a Dropbox Pro/Business, Google Apps, or Office 365 Business account anyway.

[albasha]

Ha, sounds like overselling didn't work well for them. They are even downsizing the paid plans and entirely removing the unlimited ones.

[byte1918]

What if everyone is overselling and Microsoft is the one with the most success and they are the first ones to see consequences. I mean, they have a huge infrastructure, I give them the benefit of doubt and consider also that people might be abusing.

[nsxwolf]

It seems like everywhere you look you see signs of a downturn -- less investment, less free stuff, more layoffs.

[miander]

A very unusual move and likely to lose them some customers. Some of them will cough up money and I suspect many will leave. I wonder if this was in response to abuse? At least they didn't waste the opportunity to try to move people over to their Google Docs competitor.

[mgo]

I don't understand why they need to make these cuts. It's Microsoft - they surely have access to extremely cheap hard drives through bulk purchasing. What's 10GB?

[spriggan3]

> I don't understand why they need to make these cuts. It's Microsoft - they surely have access to extremely cheap hard drives through bulk purchasing. What's 10GB?

Microsoft didn't become what it is by giving away stuff for free, quite the contrary.

[RIMR]

What's 10GB times the number of free OneDrive users?

[ja27]

Back in November. There was a way to opt in to keep your existing free tier storage.

[RIMR]

Mega offers 50GB for free.

[awgneo]

Cloud rot.

[tomc1985]

Never trust the cloud, it will always stab you in the back... eventually

[Dylan16807]

You can say the same thing about any service. Or product. Nothing that holds data is trustworthy in the long term, except specialty paper.

[3327]

No NO JoshAg. Bate and switch.

[joshAg]

Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.

[JungleGymSam]

I don't think that applies here. It's their own service.