Microsoft has discovered that if you give something free to the people, sometimes, they will take you for your word and use it as often as they can (or abuse it, to put it not so nicely). So when they offered “unlimited” storage on OneDrive for their Office 365 subscribers, little did they know that some people would upload entire movie collections, audio recordings, all their music, etc, on to the cloud service. And so now, they’re making major changes onto the storage plans so that everyone will fairly benefit from it.

For starters, there will not be unlimited storage anymore for those who are subscribed or will subscribe to Office 365 Home, University, or Personal. They will now get just 1TB (which is a lot already for some) of space on the OneDrive cloud. If you’re an existing subscriber and have exceeded that 1TB, you’ll receive notice of the change and will have 12 months to keep your files/increased storage.

The 100GB and 200GB storage plans that they have right now will be replaced by just 50GB of storage for $1.99 per month starting early 2016. But current subscribers to those plans will not have any changes done. If you signed up for Office 365 for the purpose of that unlimited storage and find that all these changes are not good for you anymore, you may get a pro-rated refund.

Free OneDrive storage space will also be affected as it will be decreasing from 15GB to just 5GB starting early 2016. If you’ve already managed to use up more than 5GB, you will receive a notice by the time the changes take place early next year, and then given 12 months to get your things in order. You will be able to receive a free one-year Office 365 Personal subscription and that should give you 1TB of storage.

SOURCE: OneDrive

2 COMMENTS

  1. I have an Office 365 subscription that I got for Office, not for the OneDrive storage. (That’s the disclaimer lest anyone thinks I’m a freeloader wanting more free things). Anyway, unlimited is unlimited. 75TB is not abusing the system. If they didn’t want people uploading that much, they shouldn’t have allowed people to upload that much. The drastic changes reek of monetization tactics with the ‘abuse’ a thinly veiled excuse. At least they could have capped it at 10TB, which is what O365 subscribers get anyway. I think the deal was that they start you at 10, then if you go over that you request more.

  2. I’m a HUGE (well, until this bait and switch, I was) Microsoft fanboy and despite owning many Android devices, I do not like or trust Google. But this move is enough I won’t be buying the Lumia 950xl and am encouraging others to follow suit. If they don’t reverse this decision, I’ll gladly move back to Android.

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