Life is not all roses at Microsoft. Early last year a confirmed 7800 staff had been made redundant with a reported 1000 more following in October. ‘Trimming the fat’ and cost cutting are one thing, but with the recent announcement of huge reductions in Onedrive storage allowance is this the business evolving or circling the wagons?
The reason Microsoft have given for the service reduction is a few users abusing the privilige. Despite the service being ‘unlimited’ Microsoft have once again proven that their definition might not be a dictionary definition as users holding over 75TB of files in the cloud are putting too much strain on the Onedrive resources. Microsoft have now cut the unlimited to a very limited 1TB, plenty for most but for a lot of users like those in Media who need to store and share high resolution files it’s paltry at best. It’s lead to the inevitable complaints that people who were tempted to Microsoft for it’s great deal are now going to have migrate all their data over to Google Drive or iOS to keep the functionality they need, a heavy undertaking with just gigabytes, let alone terabytes, of data to bring with you.
Onedrive subscriptions, independent of Office 365, will now start at 50GB, down from 100GB and 200GB with users currently on those packages unaffected. The free storage will take a huge hit going down from 15GB to 5GB ; users will have one year from November to reduce their files or risk losing some or all permanently. Currently only Personal and Student accounts are affected with no decision forthcoming either way for business users.
Insiders in the industry don’t expect this to be the last announcement about cloud capacity reductions. As more and more people move their files online for the convenience of access and sharing the strain on resources becomes greater. It’s an unfortunate fact that there can only be a finite amount of storage and so companies have to divide that up between the total number of users. As the userbase grows so to does the demand for space. Over the whole sector only Google is expected to maintain ‘unlimited’ storage purely as their bragging right but even they may have to follow the inevitable path and change that at some point.
