On November 2nd, 2015, Microsoft OneDrive suddenly announced they will soon discontinue Office 365 unlimited storage plan and also reduce the free storage plan from 15 GB down to 5 GB. It is not surprising that this announcement is not welcome and there are thousands of users (and counting) are expressing their disappointment and frustration on OneDrive’s official blog where this absurd decision was posted.
Here are the irritating changes:
- We’re no longer planning to offer unlimited storage to Office 365 Home, Personal, or University subscribers. Starting now, those subscriptions will include 1 TB of OneDrive storage.
- 100 GB and 200 GB paid plans are going away as an option for new users and will be replaced with a 50 GB plan for $1.99 per month in early 2016.
- Free OneDrive storage will decrease from 15 GB to 5 GB for all users, current and new. The 15 GB camera roll storage bonus will also be discontinued. These changes will start rolling out in early 2016.
Why they are irritating?
- If you are currently have unlimited storage and you have more than 1TB data stored, then you will have 12 months to move your data before they are gone.
- The 50 GB plan for $1.99 per month is twice as much as iCloud.
- The 15 GB camera roll storage is a promotional bonus offered to those users who installed OneDrive app on their phones and also enabled the automatic photo backup to OneDrive, and now Microsoft decided to take back the bonus they already offered. It is insane.
The reason behind the decision is absurd.
This is the reason given by OneDrive for this change:
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. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average.
Wait, what is wrong with storing 75 TB data in an unlimited cloud storage? Doesn’t unlimited storage mean “unlimited”? Also, if you decide to roll out the unlimited storage plan, then it will be fine if you let the current subscribers keep their current storage and only apply the new storage plan to new subscribers.
This change caused lots of turmoil and many users have threatened to leave OneDrive and switch to Google Drive or DropBox, especially those users with free storage plan. When you gave someone 15 GB storage and also offered another 15 GB bonus to encourage users to use your service, then it will be a big betrayal if you suddenly tell them they can only keep 5 GB storage.
I hope Microsoft will come back to its senses and rethink about this before it is too late.
