Whatever you say, you gotta hand it to Microsoft that they are in it to win it with Office 365. But the win for customers will put extreme pressure on competitors both near and far. The nearby competitors are Google, Box and DropBox who will have to respond with adding more value or lower prices LOL). The ramifications extend to the financial markets where online storage IPOs will instantly look less attractive to investors. How do you compete with a free good? You don’t. Investing to a race to the bottom is insane.
Competitors further afield will have to truly continue to innovate to add value to distinguish offerings above that of OneDrive. One vendor, eFolder, already does this by providing better security, features and functionality.
Customer-side
Directly impacting myself is that I save $1.99 a month. In early September, I wrote a two blog series on OneDrive where I moved my local “My Documents” data to OneDrive (consumer edition) to allow me to enjoy the full-on Windows 8.1 mobile experience (basically work from any device anywhere and access my data). In part one, defined OneDrive and OneDrive for Business. In the second installment , I address the data migration process (but I had to to rent more OneDrive space when I exceeded the 15GB OneDrive free capacity. The $1.99 per month took my storage limit up to 100GB per month. So when Microsoft’s Office 365 team flips the switch, I’ll be able to have another espresso doppio per month with my two bucks saved.
Seriously, here are the facts concerning OneDrive’s unlimited storage feature. Chris Jones shared the following with me. “Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365. Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost. We’ve started rolling this out today to Office 365 Home, Personal, and University customers. The roll out will continue over the coming months, so if you want to be one of the very first to get more storage, go here to put yourself at the front of the line. In the meantime, you can take advantage of the massive capacity you have today by activating the auto upload feature for your camera roll on your phone.”
Not so fast for OneDrive for Business
Jones did clarify how this impacts OneDrive for Business customers. He shared that 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. “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!”
“While unlimited storage is another important milestone for OneDrive we believe 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. 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.”
