Redmond has taken the limits off cloud storage for Office 365 subscribers. Users of the online version of Microsoft’s productivity suite now get unlimited OneDrive storage as part of their subscriptions at no additional cost.
If you are an existing Office 365 Home, Personal or University customer, you’ll see the roll out starting Monday — but it could take months for the roll out to wrap up. Microsoft is inviting you to register to be put at the front of the line if this is a must-have feature.
If you aren’t an Office 365 customer, you can get unlimited OneDrive storage and Office for $ 6.99 a month. What about business customers? Chris Jones, Corporate Vice President of OneDrive and SharePoint, shared the official word in a company blog.
An Important Milestone
“For OneDrive for Business customers, unlimited storage will be listed on the Office 365 roadmap in the coming days and we will begin updating the First Release customers in 2015, aligned with our promise to provide ample notification for significant service changes,” Jones said. “In the meantime, get started using your 1 TB of storage today by backing up all those work files kicking around on your PC — with the knowledge that even more storage is on its way.”
Jones called unlimited storage an important milestone for OneDrive but said the true value of cloud storage is only realized when it is “tightly integrated” with the tools people use to communicate, create, and collaborate, both personally and professionally.
Then he gave the enterprise pitch. “That is why unlimited storage is just one small part of our broader promise to deliver a single experience across work and life that helps people store, sync, share, and collaborate on all the files that are important to them, all while meeting the security and compliance needs of even the most stringent organizations,” Jones said.
Driving to Zero
The question is, will enterprises make the shift to Office 365? That remains to be seen, but it appears Microsoft had little choice but to amp up its OneDrive feature in to gain parity with — or in some cases outpace — its competitors.
Wes Miller, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, told us OneDrive is becoming more or less a feature of the Office 365 platform much like Apple’s and Google’s cloud storage features are part of those platforms.
“Sort of like the rest of cloud services, we are seeing this drive to nothing where the technology is built into the platform and the price is being driven down to zero or near to zero and you are paying for it in terms of the platform you are using,” Miller said.
According to Miller, the industry is witnessing a couple of influencing factors. First, Dropbox and Box are the cloud storage standards and have been for a long time, he said. Meanwhile, Google has dropped its pricing to zero and now Microsoft has followed. Google and Microsoft are trying to lure people to their productivity platforms who may use iOS devices.
“I am not sure how unlimited unlimited really is. That is always my big criticism when companies move to unlimited,” Miller said. “There is always some level where things get throttled or things stop working quite right. But obviously unlimited OneDrive storage is designed to appeal to businesses or consumers that aren’t yet on Office 365 Business or Office 365 as a consumer variant as well.”
Paul:
Posted: 2014-10-27 @ 2:41pm PT
If you are an O365 personal subscriber, sure you get a boatload of free storage.
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