Microsoft Reduces OneDrive Storage for Office 365 and Free Users, Eliminates Unlimited Option

[fogandflower]

Doesn't that put MS in line with iCloud?
Just saying, they'll all level off at the same limit once the take up hits a desired level.

I dont get the fandom, if it had been apple people on here would be "too right" and "yeah great move"...

You assumed a lot. You assume every other company will do the same as MS did. Care to give one example in cloud storage (not AT&T) business that reduced free storage size? Apple? Google? Dropbox?

And you assumed we will cheer Apple if Apple did the same thing.

I sympathize those who used close to 15GB storage in OneDrive. It must be awful feeling

 

[spinedoc77]

Bad move Microsoft. For trying to be primarily a cloud provider it seems like you're going backwards. Man, if you succeed in alienating a huge MS fanboy like myself, I wonder how others will take it. Although I've been distancing myself for some time. I cancelled my onedrive for business/azure plan a while ago because it was complete and utter junk. I moved to Google drive, I don't particularly like it but it's HIPAA compliant and it just works.

MS is really ruining overdrive. With the move to windows 10 they took away placeholders so you cannot locally see files that are online. Ostensibly this was due to the placeholders taking up space, which is quite ironic in that they now cut space for users. I've been holding onto onedrive by a thread, but that thread has now been cut.

 

[egeek84]

This is just a bad move. I wasn't sold on Office Home 365 until they announced the unlimited storage and then that's what got me to sub for 100 a year. Now that they are pulling this *#*#, I will cancel. And i'm not even one of those big time data users, hell I didn't even approach 100 gigs but I just like knowing I have unlimited storage and don't have to worry about storage. They could have kept getting 100 a year out of me for life, they just screwed this up big time.

 

[Monique1]

So please explain me once again why you are entitled to free 75TB of storage at Microsoft's expense.

Uh... because Microsoft said it was unlimited? Why would anyone be penalized for merely doing what Microsoft said was ok to do?

Geezus, some of you people crack me up.

 

[RockSpider]

This is just a bad move. I wasn't sold on Office Home 365 until they announced the unlimited storage and then that's what got me to sub for 100 a year. Now that they are pulling this *#*#, I will cancel. And i'm not even one of those big time data users, hell I didn't even approach 100 gigs but I just like knowing I have unlimited storage and don't have to worry about storage. They could have kept getting 100 a year out of me for life, they just screwed this up big time.

MS didn't screw you up, the 75 Terabiters screwed you up, and they screwed me up, but like you, I have office 365 which gives me 1 TB which is much more than I'll ever use so I'm not complaining, although I probably should be, being this is an Apple board.

 

[spinedoc77]

Wow just realized Google now has more free storage then Onedrive. 15gb versus 5gb. It's scary that Microsoft and Apple now offer the same amount of free storage space, I never thought I'd see that happen.

 

[Supermallet]

I'm amazed at the amount of people defending Microsoft here. As many people have said, if you call something unlimited, don't be surprised when someone sees how much of "unlimited" they can actually get!

But I don't think that those 75 TB accounts were the real reason for these changes. Microsoft must be having serious issues if they had to reduce all free accounts to 5 GB. Either that or they think Office 365 subscriptions will soar because people need the storage space. Here's the thing though, cloud services are pretty competitive these days, so reducing your capacity and raising your prices is a bad idea. Apple offers me 50 GB for $0.99 a month, Microsoft is now trying to charge me $1.99 a month for the same amount of space? And on top of that they're not even going to offer 100 GB or 200 GB plans anymore? This is obviously a money grab.

For the people who say "if you're getting it for free, you have no right to complain when it's taken away", I think if Microsoft were really upfront about what they were doing, then the complaints would be a lot less strident. But when the argument is, "Well some paying users took up too much space, so uh you free users now all have less space", it's pretty obvious that Microsoft is not being upfront with their customers.

I use Outlook for email since I wanted to move away from Gmail. They made a big deal about how they don't scan your emails to sell to advertisers. But now I'm thinking maybe I should just upgrade my iCloud to 200 GB per month and port start using my iCloud email address. Or maybe even go to Tutanota, which is free AND encrypted.

 

[smoledman]

Love the hysteria by freeloaders.

 

[RockSpider]

I'm amazed at the amount of people defending Microsoft here. As many people have said, if you call something unlimited, don't be surprised when someone sees how much of "unlimited" they can actually get!

But I don't think that those 75 TB accounts were the real reason for these changes. Microsoft must be having serious issues if they had to reduce all free accounts to 5 GB. Either that or they think Office 365 subscriptions will soar because people need the storage space. Here's the thing though, cloud services are pretty competitive these days, so reducing your capacity and raising your prices is a bad idea. Apple offers me 50 GB for $0.99 a month, Microsoft is now trying to charge me $1.99 a month for the same amount of space? And on top of that they're not even going to offer 100 GB or 200 GB plans anymore? This is obviously a money grab.

For the people who say "if you're getting it for free, you have no right to complain when it's taken away", I think if Microsoft were really upfront about what they were doing, then the complaints would be a lot less strident. But when the argument is, "Well some paying users took up too much space, so uh you free users now all have less space", it's pretty obvious that Microsoft is not being upfront with their customers.

I use Outlook for email since I wanted to move away from Gmail. They made a big deal about how they don't scan your emails to sell to advertisers. But now I'm thinking maybe I should just upgrade my iCloud to 200 GB per month and port start using my iCloud email address. Or maybe even go to Tutanota, which is free AND encrypted.

Just ONE customer is using the same as 14,000 customers, multiply that by 100 or even 1000, it's pretty obvious that Microsoft is being upfront with their customers.

 

[Max(IT)]

The point is that they have the keys and if legally compelled what are they going to do?

I dont know about USA, but in Europe we still have rights ...
BTW I don't have anything worth a legal warrant.

Understandable, but a shame that they are taking the free tier from 15gb down to 5gb.

This is the point I don't understand. Im ok to hit the abusers, but why to hit free plans ?

No, the real abuse is Microsoft's use of the word "unlimited' which is a marketing scam to dupe consumers.

TBH it WAS unlimited until they decided to stop offering it.
It wasn't advertised as "unlimited forever", but just unlimited.

That's like saying a door can't be opened if you don't have the key. You don't need a key to open a door, you use brute force instead.

128 bit (or 256 bit) AES encryption, most probably like your bank account...
Can it be broken ? Sure. It takes quite an effort, I don't have anything worth that to hide.

 

[jennyp]

If people didn't abuse these services there would be no need for companies to go in and see what the hell was taking so much space.

No-one abused the service. It was advertised as unlimited. Unlimited is not, "Well, use a lot but go easy." It's unlimited.

So please explain me once again why you are entitled to free 75TB of storage at Microsoft's expense.

Because they advertised that you could.

 

[silverf0x]

75TB of "Personal Storage" is taking the Pi$$ whichever way you look at at.
Put it this way, if you went if you went to an all you can eat buffet and took all of the food on offer back to your own table, leaving nothing else for any diner you could well expect to be invited to leave. Additionally it would be entirely logical for the restaurant to start to restrict usage to max 5 plates per customer for the base service and offer more plates to customers who pay more.

In this situation the greed and unreasonableness of the few, has ruined the service for the many. Most small businesses do not have 75TB of storage. If you need that level of storage then you should be prepared to pay for it. I think it was a great ambition of MS to be able to offer all the storage that their customers need. My entire personal storage needs are currently running at 1-2TB but if I took out all the media files that could be easily replaced, that need would drop to around 500-750Gb, growing at about 5% per annum.

If you bite the hand that feeds you, don't be surprised if the hand is withdrawn.

 

[navaira]

Put it this way, if you went if you went to an all you can eat buffet and took all of the food on offer back to your own table, leaving nothing else for any diner you could well expect to be invited to leave.

Put it this way, it's not like Microsoft has 1000 TB storage for everyone and the "freeloaders" took all the storage for themselves so poor people with 5 GB plans can't stick their data in. (And if Microsoft somehow DOES only have 1000 TB, they should have thought about advertising as "unlimited" very, very hard.)

 

[AFEPPL]

You assumed a lot. You assume every other company will do the same as MS did. Care to give one example in cloud storage (not AT&T) business that reduced free storage size? Apple? Google? Dropbox?

And you assumed we will cheer Apple if Apple did the same thing.

I sympathize those who used close to 15GB storage in OneDrive. It must be awful feeling

I dont recall saying any company will do the same or not. I said when Apple do something it's fine, be that increase prices or reduce services....

The free storage cloud market will find its own level - which it's doing dropbox increased to 5, apple is 5, MS is now 5, amazon is 5, cubby is 5, dumptruck is 5 hidrive is 5 and i don't recall what google is.. Looks like a pattern to me. So i understand the move they have made. Is it a smart one, who cares? "it's in the T&Cs" to use a retort from another thread defending apple on this very board.. Did MS say, or imply it was unlimited forever? No. So abuse it while you can and if things change move on. No big deal.

Just to be clear i use iCloud and pay for the extra i want, but it doesn't mean we have to have apple fandoms poking sticks at vendors when they want to do things with their offers.

 

[snowmoon]

It's an interesting phenomenon how giving someone something freely can often create the perception that the thing given is owed

15gb is hardly a kings ransom here and was frankly a "keeping up with the joneses" move designed to keep one drive relevant as a cloud provider. They have obviously decided that they do not need to attract customers to keep the platform alive and they don't care about the advantage that the additional space gives windows phone users.

 

[pika2000]

People that are complaining about the extreme few abusers don't get it. You don't punish ALL your current and future customers due to extreme few maximizer. Worse, the service itself is not that great to begin with. The only companies that do that kind of thing are wireless carriers and ISPs, simply because in those markets, there is lack of competition. In the cloud storage space, there are plenty of competition. Google offers more. Heck, even Apple's looks like a better deal now.

IMO this is Microsoft's poor marketing strategy rearing its ugly head. It seems like MS really wants to entice people to buy Office 365 subscription, and instead of sweetening the deal, they are souring the previous deals. Really poor move. I was a user since live drive. I had many issues with OneDrive, and this only seals the deal for me to look somewhere else for better solution.

For plain free storage, Google Drive seems like a better alternative now. 15GB.
For photos, flickr gives 1TB for free.
For paid services, Apple's 99c per month for 50GB is a better deal, and it integrates with your Apple stuff.

There's really no reason to use OneDrive unless you happen to get it via other means (eg. Office 365 subscription).

 

[Mark.]

This is laughable.

 

[C DM]

People that are complaining about the extreme few abusers don't get it. You don't punish ALL your current and future customers due to extreme few maximizer. Worse, the service itself is not that great to begin with. The only companies that do that kind of thing are wireless carriers and ISPs, simply because in those markets, there is lack of competition. In the cloud storage space, there are plenty of competition. Google offers more. Heck, even Apple's looks like a better deal now.

IMO this is Microsoft's poor marketing strategy rearing its ugly head. It seems like MS really wants to entice people to buy Office 365 subscription, and instead of sweetening the deal, they are souring the previous deals. Really poor move. I was a user since live drive. I had many issues with OneDrive, and this only seals the deal for me to look somewhere else for better solution.

For plain free storage, Google Drive seems like a better alternative now. 15GB.
For photos, flickr gives 1TB for free.
For paid services, Apple's 99c per month for 50GB is a better deal, and it integrates with your Apple stuff.

There's really no reason to use OneDrive unless you happen to get it via other means (eg. Office 365 subscription).

Unfortunately in life that's exactly what happens--many policies and rules and things of that nature that restrict or limit or control something have been created because of a minority that has abused something or has the potential to abuse something. Not a new or unique concept in any way.

 

[C DM]

I dont know about USA, but in Europe we still have rights ...
BTW I don't have anything worth a legal warrant.


This is the point I don't understand. Im ok to hit the abusers, but why to hit free plans ?

TBH it WAS unlimited until they decided to stop offering it.
It wasn't advertised as "unlimited forever", but just unlimited.


128 bit (or 256 bit) AES encryption, most probably like your bank account...
Can it be broken ? Sure. It takes quite an effort, I don't have anything worth that to hide.

Yes, people have rights and yes most won't have any legal reasons to have their stuff looked at. But that's not really the point--the point is that someone else has the keys to your stuff, and even though they aren't supposed to use them and in 99.9% of the cases and time won't use them, they still have those keys, which is different than no one aside from yourself having the keys.

 

[ioioos]

Its clear the '75tb users' is a smoke screen, otherwise they would just lower unlimited to 5 or 10tb.

I loved OneDrive, my favourite storage solution as a Windows and Mac User, but MS are quickly eroding they key benefits, such as storage capacity, file size and removal of the best OS integration ,placeholders in Win 8.1.

 

[snowmoon]

LOL...

https://blog.onedrive.com/office-365-onedrive-unlimited-storage/

Read the comments towards the bottom, they may have pulled the program not due to abuse, but because they could not actually implement unlimited. People signed up and got 1TB quotas that were designed to jump by 10TB when they got close, but it never really worked right and most people's quotas just sat at 1TB.

Typical MS, it's broken so let's blame the users!

EDIT: Scroll down to the end of August or beginning of September and real the problem. They advertised a feature and then were unable to deliver. The vast majority of people paid for a year and their quotas were never raised about 1TB and nobody in support seemed to know when things would change.

 

[C DM]

LOL...

https://blog.onedrive.com/office-365-onedrive-unlimited-storage/

Read the comments towards the bottom, they may have pulled the program not due to abuse, but because they could not actually implement unlimited. People signed up and got 1TB quotas that were designed to jump by 10TB when they got close, but it never really worked right and most people's quotas just sat at 1TB.

Typical MS, it's broken so let's blame the users!

How did people use up 75TB then?

 

[snowmoon]

How did people use up 75TB then?

A small number of people got the quota increases, did you bother to read the comments?

 

[C DM]

A small number of people got the quota increases, did you bother to read the comments?

Just read your post about it and asked the question based on the information you included in it.

 

[pika2000]

Unfortunately in life that's exactly what happens--many policies and rules and things of that nature that restrict or limit or control something have been created because of a minority that has abused something or has the potential to abuse something. Not a new or unique concept in any way.

Let's go back to the specific issue of cloud-storage before you go off the wall.
Like I have stated, the competition is quite healthy in this space, so this is MS' loss. OneDrive was quite attractive with 15GB free. Now it's nothing special since everybody else is at least 5GB or more (Google Drive is 15GB). Worse, since the next paid option is more expensive than iCloud, Apple users would probably just stick with iCloud, while the rest will be more attracted towards Google (15GB free, "unlimited" photo, Android integration).