Microsoft's OneDrive has become a lot more attractive today as the company has announced that it is lowering the cost for additional storage and increasing the amount of free storage too. Prices are being cut by 70%, making storage ridiculously cheap if you are in the need for cloud storage.
The new monthly prices will be $1.99 for 100 GB (previously $7.49), and $3.99 for 200 GB (previously $11.49) and there is more good news if you are an Office 365 subscriber.
If you subscribe to Microsoft's subscription-based Office service, you will now get 1TB of storage included. This applies to all of the consumer SKUs starting with Office 365 Personal for $6.99 a month, and adds extraordinary value to that package. For that price, you would get 1TB of storage and Office, compared with $9.99 a month for 1TB of storage on Google Drive, while Dropbox charges the same price for just 100GB of storage.
For those of you who are still content with your free space, Microsoft is tossing good news your way too. Starting today, all accounts now have 15 GB of free storage; this is double the previous free amount which was 7 GB, and matches Google Drive's 15GB of free space.
These dramatic price cuts highlight that cloud storage prices are in a race to the bottom. The fact that Microsoft will cut prices by 70% shows that storage is cheap and at this point, cloud providers want users, and are willing to do whatever it takes to bring them in, even if that means cutting revenues.
It makes sense too - while there are not any published statistics about the rate at which users switch platforms, we would lean towards the opinion that once you chose a cloud provider for storage, you are highly unlikely to switch. So, for Microsoft (and others), it's critical to get users to adopt their platform first and worry about monetization second.
For Windows users, besides the additional free space, the added benefit of OneDrive is that it comes baked-in with Windows 8. Microsoft has made it available out of the box and when you tie it all in with your Microsoft account, setting up a new PC takes only a few seconds.
Source: Microsoft
79 Comments - Add comment