WHOOO Microsoft screws up OneDrive!

Either there is more to this story than MS is telling the public or this is just sad.

Anyway, Microsoft is going back on its promise of unlimited storage for Office 365 members. And worse, they are reducing free storage pretty much across the board and even removing some free allowances.

The reason? Some people used roughly 75TB+ of storage which is more than 1400x the average usage.

Wait! What? So, people who were getting "unlimited", which was only available through a subscription service were using it as unlimited storage so they are deciding to take storage away from... EVERYONE!

For any who might think I'm incapable of being critical of Microsoft... today you shall be proven wrong.

I've always stated that I generally agreed with Microsoft because, generally, they actually make good and logical decisions. So, it isn't really all that hard to back them up. Most times. This defies credulity.

Let's start with the obvious... the people abusing it were only those who had "unlimited" accounts. And those accounts only came along with an Office 365 subscription. So, it makes no sense why the standard free allotments dropping across the board and things like camera roll allowances are being removed. These have absolutely NOTHING to do with the abused portion of the service.

Also, this moves makes MS officially the worst mainstream cloud offering for free storage. Both Apple and Google offer larger free storage amounts along with pretty darn generous plans for special data types. For instance, unlimited photos on Apple. So, basically, everyone gets screwed over AND the net result is that your service is now markedly less competitive than anything else out there.

Next we'll move onto the abusers and their impact. Really, it shouldn't be all that bad. Lets think realistically. I have managed to upload 75TB of storage to OneDrive. How much would that cost me anywhere else? TONS. These people were effectively locked into an Office 365 subscription in perpetuity. And over time, you can basically look at the amount of revenue to need to realize specifically to cover the cost of Office as approaching 0 over time.

Segue to explain that last statement: companies love subscriptions because over time they tend to generate more revenue than they would have realized with a perpetual license model. And, over time users will generally hit a point where they don't feel they need any new functionality and would stop upgrading anyway. So, there is an average point in time at which you can effectively consider any revenue you receive from a subscription to be "free". You were going to keep developing anyway, but if they weren't on a subscription you'd stop receiving money at some point.

Once that point is hit, you can basically divert all revenue to other bundled services and offerings. In this case, offsetting OneDrive operation costs. So, how much does cloud storage cost? To be fair, that is probably a hard one for the company to nail down. There ARE hardware costs, but you can generally consider those to be lower than the average consumer costs and there are costs associated with things like power and rent, etc... but those are also pretty darn low (comparatively). And all of these costs generally go down over time (storage gets cheaper per TB, energy efficiency increases and data density per disk goes up over time).

So, while these users were using an absurd amount of storage, you can also effectively count on them being users MUCH longer than the average subscription holder. And thus you can divert more of their revenue to OneDrive maintenance.

Also, if these users are only a small fraction of the users, the costs can also be subsidized by other users subscriptions.

None of this means Microsoft needs to permit this sort of usage. Just saying... if this is the sole reason, they are more than likely just blowing it out of proportion.

But lets say whether we have the whole story or not Microsoft truly needs to rein in this activity. Well, then you only need to target the abusers. Right now my Office 365 allotment is 10TB. That would reduce the impact per abuser by almost a full order of magnitude by capping it there. No need to impact other users at all.

Of course, I don't think this is the whole story. I would be surprised if this even factors into it at all. I don't doubt that they are telling the truth about there being such users or even about the relative data consumption. Those numbers are probably accurate and truthful. But, as indicated above, those abuses aren't aligned with the service changes. So what explains it? 

They are a victim of their own success. Basically, Microsoft is the most open with their services. If they are on-boarding a lot of iOS and Android users into OneDrive, it is probably those free account which are hurting them far more than the abusers. Even at 1400:1 the free users probably consume FAR more data in their data centers than these outliers. This was probably true even before they started promoting these services on competing platforms. But, with Apple even bringing Microsoft on stage to demo Office on the iPad Pro and many Android OEMs agreeing to ship with Microsoft services installed by default, you can imagine that they may either be fearing or experiencing an onslaught of unpaid users.

Beyond that, you can probably also chalk this up a tad to greed. With agreements in place and good advertising it might mean more users wanting to look into your products and services. Lowering the free amount makes an Office 365 sub for more data look even more tantalizing. They can always bring the cap back on paid subscriptions later if they pick up accordingly.

So, while I have no doubts that Microsoft wants to stop abusers that only explains removing the existing unlimited option for paid users and replacing it with a reasonable cap.

Removing free storage and lowering limits that weren't associated with the Office 365 unlimited storage can only be explained by either a disproportionate increase in unpaid users, or storage usage across the board or by an urge to prod more users into paying OR some combination of those. Thinking all 3 factor into it.

And hey! That is a reasonable justification for the action. But I'm still kind of upset, because even if I'm right and there is some potential legitimacy I can't back any decision where the justification officially provided either makes no sense or is a lie.