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Microsoft Removes The Limits On Cloud Storage

This article is more than 9 years old.

Witness the commoditization of cloud storage – Microsoft today announced that all customers of its Office 365 product will get unlimited storage within their OneDrive cloud synchronization and storage product. Today Home, Personal and University customers get the deal, over the next few months everyone will be included.

To put that into perspective – customers can pay $6.99 per month and receive not only access to Office 365 (which includes all the obvious Office applications) but also unlimited cloud storage.

The key thing here is the benefits that come from tightly coupled applications and storage, this is the reason that I’ve been slightly negative about the opportunity that third party storage vendors (Box, Dropbox et al) might have over time. It’s also the reason that Box and Dropbox are racing fast to build an ecosystem (and why Dropbox bought seemingly unrelated vendors like Mailbox). Microsoft pointed out the perspective that:

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.

I completely agree with that position – storage is a commodity that only becomes valuable when tied into applications and workflow.

Of course this announcement raises the question about Box. Recently Box and Microsoft announced a special version of Office customized for use alongside Box, what this announcement means for that deal remains to be seen.

It seems to me that cloud storage solutions will soon be divided into those that are deeply integrated into applications and those who are not – and I suspect the latter have a very short life expectancy indeed.

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