It wasn’t long ago when almost all the who’s who of the tech industry wanted to ride the cloud storage hype train. And since cloud storage services are virtually the same, regardless of who’s providing it, some companies resorted to offering users with bigger free storage as a way to lure them in.
One of the companies who did it was Microsoft. Back in the early days, the software giant only gave out free 7GB storage to all of its users and offered subscription-based plans for those who needed more cloud storage head room. Eventually, Microsoft ran a short campaign where eligible users are able to upgrade their cloud storage capacity to 25GB at no extra charge.
With the launch of OneDrive, Microsoft ramped up their game and provided up to 5GB additional cloud storage to users who would refer someone to its cloud service. On top of that, the software giant also gave out free 3GB by just enabling the automatic upload feature of OneDrive.
However, as the competition in the cloud storage scene becomes more heated, Microsoft was forced to once again outdo themselves (and their competitors, particularly Google) by offering users with free 15GB of cloud storage space right from the onset. Moreover, OneDrive also provided an extra 15GB specifically for camera roll back-up, so as to not use up any space on the user’s default 15GB storage.
All seems well and good until yesterday when we received an email from the Microsoft OneDrive team, informing us about the changes that are about to take place on July 27, 2016.
On the email, Microsoft has announced that the dedicated 15GB for photo back-up will no longer be offered to users. In addition to that, the software giant will also decrease the default storage from 15GB down to 5GB.
I’m not a big fan of cloud storage services, so quite frankly, I’m not too bothered by these unfortunate changes. However, I feel that this move will spark a big uproar from OneDrive users, and will put Microsoft at a slight disadvantage against Google who still continues to give users free 15GB storage as soon as they sign up for Google Drive.