Microsoft Makes Concessions to Disgruntled OneDrive Fans | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Makes Concessions to Disgruntled OneDrive Fans

thurrott.com

63 pointsingve18 comments

This whole saga has been terribly embarrassing for anyone who was evangelizing for onedrive, whether they were employees or just excited fans.

They now have to go back on their word and explain that 30gb is actually somehow 5gb unless you provide a credit card # then it's 1tb for a year for free and after that if you don't remember to opt out $100/year or something. Why not leave everything as it was for current customers and just limit new ones. They've done it before when they had skydrive/windows live mesh/windows live folders/office live workspaces which each offered an independant amount of free data (usually somewhere between 5-25gb) when they eventually consolidated them all anyone who had previously used the services got 25gb while OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) offered 15gb.

And in general grandfathered deals aren't unprecedented, nearly every credit card/cell phone plan/[any service with long term agreements] that changes lets people who had the original keep what they had and just changes things for new customers.

I don't evangelise exactly, but I do try to raise the issue of backups generally with the teenagers I teach. Sync to online storage is relatively easy to do and hard to forget to do (if you see what I mean). College work is relatively small in file size. The 'stuff' can be larger (into 10s of Gb).

They should just add a cap at 1 TB (plus maybe a pay option for more) and leave Onedrive as it was. And by that I mean: Onedrive like it was on Windows 8.1, with file representations. I convertet many people to their ecosystem in the Win8 days, but now my advice is a bit embarassing in retrospect as they do not prove to be reliable.

The Placeholder files are actually more deeply integrated into Windows 8.1 than you might realise: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn3...

The choice to remove them in 10 seems partly driven via user metrics and support calls - users were confused about which files were available when.

It makes using OneDrive pretty much impossible in bandwidth or disk space constrained environments, though.

Microsoft made a decision to move away from the SharePoint/Groove "OneDrive for Business", mostly because of the broken sync engine.

I thought the OneDrive changes were driven by the enterprise considerations. Stubbing would be very useful to VDI and an uptick in solutions like VDI that commoditizes the Windows experience in a manner that isn't complimentary to Windows.

So basically, Groove/Sharepoint Workspace/OneDrive for Business is dead, good to know.

Sad they haven't fixed their sync engine.

Its seems so silly. Like they give out unlimited storage and market the crap out of it. Then what do they expect consumers to do be stoked on having it but politely not use it? Then cutting storage down for it free tier... I don't know man I mean how much money do you really think they could be losing?

Seen from very far away and totally outside, this looks like an internal push-and-shove, with the (new ?) head of OneDrive saying "screw it, we're not paying out of our budget for the prizes that the hardware teams are handing out to their customers".

The worrisome part is that it took one month to sort this out. Sort of.

Ahhh good ole Microsoft

tldr; Use link below and your account will not be affected when the amount of free storage changes from 15 GB to 5 GB and the +15 GB camera roll bonus is discontinued.*

https://preview.onedrive.com/bonus/

Looks like it's an OAuth2 client application that you grant permission to top out the reduced free storage with an equal amount of bonus storage.

I don't understand what you are trying to explain.

You have to sign up for OneDrive Preview to keep your current (free) storage limit. OneDrive Preview adds the storage back to your account.

You pay for Office 365 and you can get only a refund, you're a free user and you get a full free year.

Yap, this is how Microsoft creates loyal customers, punishing them

Anecdotally I think that products like OneDrive are mostly in competition with USB hard drives rather than other online services for consumers. The massive free account is a very good deal, but the recurring payment certainly is not compared to just buying a $100 drive.

Why not offer a product for $100+ that lasts for 5 years. This is what people wanted with the free product, so maybe they would actually pay for it.

Wait, so do Office 365 Home customers not get "unlimited" storage anymore?

I believe it is capped at 1 TB now.

Which is 1TB per person. Home supports 5 users so that's 5TB.

Even at 1TB, it's reasonably cheap online storage....

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