Storage Wars: Microsoft slashes prices for additional storage
Cheap cloud storage services are fast becoming a battleground for the world’s biggest software companies, from Amazon’s new Fire phone with unlimited photo storage to Apple’s recent announcement of a price cut. of nearly 70% for iCloud plans, even hardware giant ASUS is getting in on the stock.
Microsoft, following in the footsteps of rivals such as Apple and Google, announced on June 23 that its popular cloud storage service, OneDrive, would expand its free storage tier and reduce the costs of its paid plans.
The changes are scheduled for July, with OneDrive’s free storage allotment more than doubled, offering 15 gigabytes (GB) to all users of the service. Paid plans include an additional 100GB for $1.99/month ($23.88/year) and 200GB for $3.99/month/$47.88/year; both plans have a 52% price reduction from their current offerings.
OneDrive’s new pricing is in line with Google Drive’s 100GB and Apple’s 200GB plans, each of which offers rates of about 24 cents per gigabyte, per year.
Even more impressive was Microsoft’s announcement of a big increase in storage space for Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers. The subscription-based Office suite currently gives users 27GB of cloud storage; next month, that will increase to a terabyte, more than 37 times the previous storage space. Office 365 University, a four-year program for students, will also receive the 1TB storage upgrade for free.
By comparison, Google Apps, a free cloud-based suite of apps that provides Microsoft Office-like services, comes with just 15GB of free storage, just 2% of the new Office 365 plan.
Additionally, Office 365 Home, which currently includes the full Office suite for up to five PCs/Macs, will give each user 1TB of storage, that’s up to 5TB of cloud storage and one year of Office 365 for $100.
With Microsoft, Google, Apple, and even ASUS now offering similarly priced options for cloud storage, there may be more emphasis on the cloud services that come with storage, rather than the amount of storage itself. .
It also raises questions about whether the other big cloud-based storage companies will lower prices to compete; Dropbox and Amazon, whose 100GB options cost $99 and $50 respectively, are now priced well above their competitors for the same service.
The updated storage structure of Microsoft OneDrive and Office 365 will roll out sometime in July, and current paid subscribers will automatically upgrade to the lower prices.