Remember back in school when one miscreant did something naughty and the whole class had to stay behind and pay the penalty for that single person’s transgression? For most of us, that kind of punitive approach to misbehaviour should be a long (or very long) distant memory. I say should because although it is for me, I’m erring on the side of caution in case it’s actually usual corporate practice for entire departments to be forced to work longer hours or for everyone to have their pay cut because one person on the team messed up.
The reason for my sudden interest in crime and punishment is not purely nostalgic, however. What has piqued my curiosity is the announcement from Microsoft that it is scrapping unlimited cloud storage for Office 365 Home, Personal and University subscribers. From now on, those subscribers will be limited to 1Tb of OneDrive storage.
Why did Microsoft take this decision? Well, it look as if it’s down to the all familiar story of a few bad apples spoiling it for the rest of us. “Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers,” Microsoft stated, “a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75Tb per user or 14,000 times the average.”
There you have it. Now, we can all appreciate 75Tb of free storage might be taking it a bit too far but, as Microsoft points out, only a small number of users are guilty of doing that. In any case, Microsoft did promise those subscribers ‘unlimited storage’. Unless there was something in the small print stating that unlimited was actually limited, then whether users filled up 75Tb of data on OneDrive is neither here nor there.
Besides, Microsoft’s own figures reveal that the average OneDrive user has just over 5Gb of OneDrive storage. This suggests that imposing a limit of 1Tb shouldn’t affect that many subscribers, but if the number of users abusing the system is so small, might it not have been easier for Microsoft to impose limits on them? Unlike teachers who usually don’t know who the perpetrators are when they impose a blanket punishment on the whole class, Microsoft can easily identify those abusing the system.
In any case, if the reason for setting a limit on storage space is that the system is being abused by a small number of users at the high end, why is Microsoft cutting the allowances for paid plans and free storage? If the average person uses just over 5Gb of OneDrive storage, why would Microsoft cut the paid plans from 100Gb and 200Gb to 50Gb? I’ll leave it to you to ponder why, given the fact so many users have a shade over 5Gb OneDrive storage, it would reduce the free option from 15Gb to 5Gb.
Judging by the below the line comments to the announcement, response to the announcement for OneDrive users has been overwhelmingly negative. Many are threatening to take their storage and their custom elsewhere. And I guess that’s the big difference between school and business. Unlike pupil, customers subject to a blanket punishment don’t have to come back the next day.
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