Earlier this week, Microsoft announced some changes to its consumer cloud storage product, OneDrive (with more details in this FAQ).
Microsoft Reneges on Unlimited OneDrive Storage Promise – https://t.co/J9PUpkVeBj pic.twitter.com/Oy2A8YcSH4
— Paul Thurrott (@thurrott) November 3, 2015
Whilst the changes to OneDrive storage quotas are disappointing for some users, that’s life – you don’t get much that’s genuinely free and Microsoft clearly wasn’t making money on OneDrive.
What I find more disappointing is that Microsoft has created a real mess, after so much positive publicity in the new cloud-first, mobile-first Microsoft that Satya Nadella is leading. And it’s not about the products – the marketing guys are to blame here. First of all, there was nothing on the Office blogs about this – the announcement is on a separate OneDrive blog. Then that announcement refers to “Office 365 consumer subscribers”. So, as one person commented on the Office 365 Yammer network:
“Oh Microsoft what were you thinking with your poorly articulated and conceived change to OneDrive? https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_change . What a mess! Now people are emailing me and asking when they will lose space on their OneDrive and I have to explain ‘not that OneDrive this OneDrive’ and ‘not that Office 365 this Office 365′”
As well as two OneDrive products (OneDrive and OneDrive for Business, although sometimes with a unified client) and two Skype products (Skype and Skype for Business, again becoming more integrated but not quite there) we now seem to have the marketing teams talking about two sets of Office 365 subscription plans (Office 365 consumer and Office 365 business).
Anyway… setting aside some dubious product naming decisions, a retrenchment from “unlimited” storage (we all know what unlimited means to marketing departments… and surely it can be managed with an acceptable use policy if it’s being used to extremes) and some mightily annoyed end users who are about to see a drop in their OneDrive storage, what does this actually mean for Office 365 customers? I heard one MVP announce that Microsoft was reducing the amount of storage in Office 365 – and, unless we’re talking about an Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscriber, that’s simply not the case.
Well, if you have an Office 365 consumer subscription, you still get 1TB of storage (per user – so with my family of 4 users on Office 365 Home, that’s potentially 4TB of storage) and, if you have an Office 365 business subscription, then the unlimited storage was never rolled out (at least not on any tenant I’ve seen) – although at the time of writing it is still on the Office 365 Roadmap as “in development” (I do expect that to change, although I haven’t seen any announcements from Microsoft).
In essence, it seems “unlimited” is a terabyte. Which may not be what the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the meaning of unlimited but is still a huge uplift on any file shares I’ve ever seen provisioned to end users!