Talking tech since 2003

Want a good deal on some online storage? Microsoft made a move today to make its online storage service, OneDrive, one of the best deals possible. A new post on the OneDrive blog offers up all the details about what a subscription will get you.

Right off the bat, OneDrive’s former free storage cap of 7 GB has been more than doubled, with 15 GB now being the minimum you get at no cost. From there, subscribing to Office 365 ($9.99 a month, or $6.99 for one person) will provide 1 TB of storage at no extra cost. If you don’t want to get an Office subscription and just want to get OneDrive on its own, you can get 100 GB for two bucks a month, an amount that was previously $7.49. For twice the price, you’ll get twice the storage – that’s four dollars for 200 GB, an amount that used to cost $11.49.

As for what could be motivating these new, lower prices, it seems that Microsoft is becoming aggressive in terms of providing value adds for its services. With Office being available on the iPad, it’s certainly a bonus to users if they get OneDrive services bundled right in. That keeps more users in Microsoft’s ecosystem, and with more potential customers for other bits of software.

Moreover, cloud storage is becoming the same kind of “race to the bottom” service that email once was. Remember when you had to pay for email that had more than a few megabytes of storage? These days, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an email service that offers tons of storage for zero dollars. Don’t be surprised if the same thing happens with cloud storage services. Somehow I managed to get about 29 GB of free Dropbox storage, mostly through inviting friends or writing about it on Facebook or something.

That’s because there’s always a cost with anything online that seems “free.” How Dropbox or Box will figure out how to show advertisements to me as I use my cloud-shared folders, I’m not quite sure – but they’ll find a way. In the meantime, maybe I should make the switch to OneDrive…sounds like I can get a whole lot of storage for a whole lot of nothing once these changes take effect in July.

[OneDrive Blog]

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