It’s a story we’ve seen repeated many times here at Coolsmartphone. First, a company offers something that’s unlimited. Then a small selection of customers heavily abuse that “unlimited” thing and the company starts to switch things around so that “unlimited” isn’t really “unlimited”.
Here, Windows SkyDrive (sorry, OneDrive) is undergoing changes and you can kiss goodbye to their much-hyped unlimited storage. They’re also reducing the size of the free storage you get too.
Whilst Google Drive offers 15GB of free storage (and OneDrive also did the same), Microsoft are now dropping free storage to 5GB for all users. They’re also ditching the 15GB bonus “camera roll” allowance.
As for those holding “unlimited” accounts, you’re now going to get 1TB. So, just to be clear on this…
“Unlimited = 1TB”
…I know, I know.
One user has, according to Microsoft, uploaded 75TB of stuff to their cloud account. Microsoft are giving him and anyone else using more than 1TB a year to find a new home or reduce their usage
Microsoft tell us..
Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings.
Yes, shockingly people actually stupidly believed that “unlimited” actually meant, y’know, “unlimited”.
Fools.
Although 75TB of stuff is a little mad, why not just kick off the abusers, put a “fair usage policy” in and at least give the majority of users the ability to enjoy the service as advertised?
And why drop free storage down to 5GB? That’s smaller than most USB pen drives and will fill up easily. This isn’t ideal if you want people to “move to the cloud”.
Sadly it’s yet another example of this ..
1 – A company gambles that, by advertising something as “free” or “unlimited”, most people won’t use it to the full extreme, and the company will get lots of excited new users (bait).
2 – Blaming a “small minority of users”, the company then seems “shocked” that some users actually took the wording of their advertised product literally. The same company then chastises the entire user base, knowing full well that the customers probably won’t move because it’s too much hassle (switch).