This morning, Microsoft announced that all Office 365 accounts will come with unlimited OneDrive storage. Gone are the 1 terabyte caps that were recently introduced. If you pay for Office, your storage is free.
It’s a good, if not surprising, move from Microsoft: The company has worked to improve the value profile of its Office 365, productivity-as-a-service offering for some time. Free storage is a good feature. Storage is a feature. The more you can offer, the better.
The price of storage has been in free fall for years. Bundling an unlimited dollop into Office 365 is the penultimate step in that particular progression. The final zero-cost level will occur when large platform companies offer free, unlimited storage to all users, period. For now, Microsoft is following other cloud providers in selling unlimited storage capacity, like Box.
Office 365 has been a win for Microsoft. If the company can improve the product’s growth rate, it will assist the aging software giant in its shift from software sales, to software-as-a-serivce, or SaaS.
Here’s the key part:
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. […] For OneDrive for Business customers, 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.
Remember when people tried to sell cloud gigabytes? What a silly time.
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