Microsoft’s OneDrive will now provide more limited cloud storage for its Office 365 Home, Personal, and University subscribers. The change will come in the first few months of the next year, when all storage limitations will be capped to 1TB.
In addition, the American colossal company plans to modify some extra storage options as well. More specifically, the OneDrive’s 100GB and 200GB storage options will be replaced by a 50GB for $1.99 per month plan while the free storage that the types of users mentioned above used to have will be reduced to 5GB from the original 15GB.
And to all that, don’t forget to add the free 15GB “camera roll” for smartphone users which will be removed by Microsoft.
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It is worth mentioning, however, that the above does not apply to enterprise users, which makes sense given that that type of users are apparently those who use the service the most – or at least they use most of space they’re given.
Moreover, it goes without saying that rest of the service’s users are not satisfied with that new announcement. In that sense, a backlash has gone online and has attracted 5,500 signatures asking Microsoft to reconsider. But come to think about it, while the tech giant’s decision may seem irrational, it was actually necessary in order to preserve the expenses at sensible levels.
But in order to better understand the company’s decision and why any promises of limitless storage capacity is hard to keep in the cloud storage market, we need to take under consideration the “race to zero”.
As the Motley Fool manages to describe fairly accurately, “The ‘race to zero’ refers to the plunging prices of cloud-based storage, which occurred due to plummeting costs of hard drive storage and intense competition between companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet‘s Google.”. The specific source also mentions that from the year 1995 to 2014, the price of a GB of cloud-based storage went from $1,120 to $0,03.
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Last March, Google put in the market some surprisingly aggressive low prices for its cloud storage service making the competition far more intense, and now Microsoft’s retreat makes it a more lucrative option than Google, Box or Amazon.
From another viewing angle, one could say the Microsoft did not really gave up the fight rather than it took a break from the “race to zero” which had obviously started becoming a tad more costly than it should.
Besides, considering that Microsoft has had some bumps along the way during the last few quarters – such as its Nokia acquisition which turned out to be not so profitable – perhaps it would be wiser if the company chose to concentrate on other more profitable markets for some time.
Source: The Motley Fool
