OneDrive reduces free tier from 15GB to 5GB | Hacker News Reader

OneDrive reduces free tier from 15GB to 5GB

support.office.com

51 pointsnovaleaf42 comments

    We’re also no longer planning to offer unlimited storage to Office 365 Home,
    Personal, or University subscribers.

The real story. Now they're forcing already paying customers to double-dip. Home and Personal I can understand, but not being generous to students seems the opposite of how Microsoft has been in the past. I also don't see anything about how an Office 365 subscriber could buy extra storage. At least the 1TB limit is per-user.

Storage is always limited, and it is unlikely that being more generous like this makes sense.

Yes, but using the word "unlimited" as a temporary marketing gimmick needs to stop.

It'll stop as soon as people stop believing it. Until then...

Offering unlimited space was a mistake from the start. Cutting down on their free tier though is a bad move.

I use OneDrive partly cause I got 5 licenses of Office along with it for my family - which is a steal considering what you get even if its 1TB and not unlimited. If you compare Office 365 Home pricing with the popular Dropbox for example you'll see its absolutely worth it. My concern though is what happens if MS decides to cut down from 1TB to 100GB next month...

If you compare Office 365 Home pricing with the popular Dropbox for example you'll see its absolutely worth it.

I have both Office 365 and Dropbox Pro. But as online storage, they are really miles apart. The OneDrive client is flaky, slow, and does not do delta sync, the Dropbox client is pretty much the absolute opposite - fast, does delta sync, and LAN sync. Applications that upload through the OneDrive API (I use rclone and Arq) often fail with API errors.

In the end, you cannot simply compare prices. Office 365 is great if you need Microsoft Office, the OneDrive storage and Skype minutes are the cherries on top. But if you need to move significant amounts of data, Dropbox Pro is a steal at $9.99 per month compared to Office 365.

I do agree about the client and Dropbox being more universally supported but I haven't had any speed issues with OneDrive, both Dropbox and Onedrive max out my upstream when syncing. I do use Microsoft Office (and so do other members of my family) but I cannot justify paying an extra to have DB when OneDrive offers the same space albeit a worse performing client.

My only with with OneDrive was the removal of placeholders feature with the Windows 10 upgrade.

> Applications that upload through the OneDrive API (I use rclone and Arq) often fail with API errors.

Speaking of rclone, I'm surprised how much Amazon Cloud Drive's API has improved. It's still not viable for sync, but I'm using it as a secondary backup for files I won't access very often. For some purposes, it's an even better steal at $60 a year.

(I hope they won't go the way of Microsoft and renege on their unlimited offer though.)

They are so backwards. First the reduce it from unlimited to to 15GB. And now to 5GB. And blame it on the user. Way to go. End users are completely knocked down and are questioning cloud services.

And Win10 with its spying, so nice to the end user. No wonder their brands are burned, the global market share of WinPhone fall to 1.1% in Q4 2015. So sad, because the products were damn fine until Satya Nadella (and Bill Gates in the background) took over from Steve Balmer.

> End users are completely knocked down and are questioning cloud services.

End users should be questioning any "cloud" service that has unlimited data storage.

Yes, but Windows 10 is neither free (you can trade a valid Win7/8 license for a Win10 license) nor cloud product per se (more a subscription). And when you buy a Win10 Home, Student or Pro license they in all cases spy on you and your data. There is no way to turn it off, except with the LTSB license that is only sold to large enterprise corporations. That's not the Microsoft of the Balmer era, and a lot worse than any product of the competition.

The article is about their 'cloud' storage service, and thats what I commented on - Windows has had a laundry list of issues since v1.0, so honestly anyone still using it now gets no sympathy from me when their poor decision bites them in the ass.

> We overcommitted with our free storage limits and we want to focus on delivering high-value productivity and collaboration experiences that benefit the majority of our users.

I wonder if Google will also downsize its free tier. I also wonder if there is a real business in cloud hosting. I doesn't seem like Dropbox is doing well either.

Cloud hosting can be a real business, since it solves a real problem. The problem is that Microsoft/Google/etc. sell storage with little profit or even underpriced to grab market share as quickly as possible.

Maybe they are figuring out by now that the vast majority of the people who fall for free/cheap cloud storage will never pay up. The real money is in business customers who are not data hoarders, but pay 10 dollar per month per user for a Dropbox Pro/Business, Google Apps, or Office 365 Business account anyway.

Ha, sounds like overselling didn't work well for them. They are even downsizing the paid plans and entirely removing the unlimited ones.

What if everyone is overselling and Microsoft is the one with the most success and they are the first ones to see consequences. I mean, they have a huge infrastructure, I give them the benefit of doubt and consider also that people might be abusing.

People over at thurrott.com think this has to do something with the allegedly upcoming full device backup feature in Windows 10.

I can imagine easily having terabytes of backup data for unlimited plans. Still I don't get why the free tier needs to shrink.

It seems like everywhere you look you see signs of a downturn -- less investment, less free stuff, more layoffs.

A very unusual move and likely to lose them some customers. Some of them will cough up money and I suspect many will leave. I wonder if this was in response to abuse? At least they didn't waste the opportunity to try to move people over to their Google Docs competitor.

I don't understand why they need to make these cuts. It's Microsoft - they surely have access to extremely cheap hard drives through bulk purchasing. What's 10GB?

> I don't understand why they need to make these cuts. It's Microsoft - they surely have access to extremely cheap hard drives through bulk purchasing. What's 10GB?

Microsoft didn't become what it is by giving away stuff for free, quite the contrary.

In the past, Microsoft has provided a lot of free stuff, provided you have a valid Windows license. Browsers, video players, development tools etc.

Online storage is a physical object that requires dedicated infrastructure, whereas software can be built and forgotten about.

Not really, all of those things mentioned need constant security patches even if they don't receive new features. You can't have an insecure Microsoft free application on a non-EOL Windows. They patch things all the time. Sure it doesn't seem like as big of a cost as hard drives, but Microsoft needs to pay engineers and QA guys to fix those programs. Nothing is done for free.

What's 10GB times the number of free OneDrive users?

Back in November. There was a way to opt in to keep your existing free tier storage.

Mega offers 50GB for free.

Cloud rot.

Never trust the cloud, it will always stab you in the back... eventually

You can say the same thing about any service. Or product. Nothing that holds data is trustworthy in the long term, except specialty paper.

A shrink wrapped product (without DRM) can be used forever, even if the vendor vanishes. Many computers still run old DOS based systems or Win95 with software that still runs just fine in a VM or on old hardware.

A subscription based service has disadvantages in this regards, it's like a rent. You don't own it and can't control it.

You can use the bits forever, but that's a different problem entirely.

Anything that stores data will physically rot and stop working. You can't trust it much more than you can trust a cloud service.

There are many products in the world that can be used for centuries, fixed up when anything breaks. Data storage does not really have any products that fit that description.

It's not.

* Shrink wrapped software (without DRM) runs on your computer, you have full control over it forever.

* Subscription based software with DRM may also run on your computer, but only as long as you rent it, then it stops working and you can't access your data.

* Cloud service is a subscription based software that runs on someone else computer, with the same disadvantages as above.

A cloud storage locks you in a software eco system/API. So it's a software and storage topic.

Shrink wrapped software locks you into an eco system. How are you supposed to get it to run, without using the right OS and support programs?

Many cloud APIs are trivial. Cloud file storage has basically zero lock-in.

If your argument is "don't buy subscription software", then I can agree. But "cloud" covers a lot more than that, and cloud data storage in particular, the subject of the article, has very little downside.

Is that so? OneCloud, DropBox, etc rely mainly on a program that runs only on specific OS versions. The API's are non-standard and do lock in you. And third party programs that break when the API changes. Or who is using such cloud storage only via web interface?

We are not speaking about FTP services that were common in the DotCom bubble era, right? And eg MySpace.com originally (until 2001) used to be one of them. And there would be common API protocols like WebDAV and scp/ssh, but do Dropbox & co support them? ("OneDrive for Business", which isn't OneDrive but a branded Sharepoint, supports a limited subset of WebDAV)

You can get simple API implementations for most languages, with lots of convenient translation layers that let you switch your code in seconds. They can't change APIs on a whim, that would break existing installs.

Or for most of these just use standard filesystem access to your local copy.

Holding the bits gives you so many more options with regards to spontaneous changes in service quality. As a nearby comment alludes to, you don't have to deal with all the BS that comes with renting. It is saddening to think that people find this kind of impermanence acceptable; they even defend it!

(Of cour$e they do)

Edit: to be fair, it's nice to be in control of the bits, whether you use them internally or offer them as a service... but as a user it is frustrating to see what used to be a DIY world turn into this... sort-of stucco skyscrapers we call "the cloud"

(And it is especially obnoxious to watch companies sell them the cloud, as if it were so unobtainable in the past... but of course there's money to be made in new markets, so onward!)

We're talking about cloud sync. You always have a copy. You're in control.

No NO JoshAg. Bate and switch.

Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.

I don't think that applies here. It's their own service.

That's always how it works.

They make a service that matches the others in features. That's embrace.

Then they gave a large amount of storage (relative to the other free offerings) to convince people to come over to their service instead of the others. That's extend.

Then once they've weathered the cost of providing so much free storage better than the others and/or gotten a bunch of entrenched customers, they severely reduce the amount of free storage with no warning or grandfathering. That's extinguish.

If you switched over to them from someone else for the extra amount of storage for the free tier, you're fucked. You need to download and store elsewhere (up to) 10 GB, and do it fast before they charge you.

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