An Open Letter to Microsoft about Trust and OneDrive

Dear Microsoft,

You have screwed me over plenty of times in the past and yet I decided to give you another chance earlier this year by paying for a yearly Office365 subscription for my household. When it was announced that Microsoft would be rolling out “Unlimited” storage, I signed up for the waiting list so I can consolidate a few other cloud storage providers into one. I am now not only regretting migrating my files over to OneDrive but I am also regretting my decision to give Microsoft a second chance.

Let me be perfectly clear about one thing, I don’t need “unlimited” storage, in fact I was perfectly content with the initial 10 TB offering and even doubted I would use more then 30% of that. My big problem is that Microsoft is back to their old bait and switch routine that ultimately made me loose a lot of trust with them in the first place, if you have ever purchased a retail Windows License and then upgraded some hardware in your computer, you will know what I mean.

My problem here is trust. Microsoft makes a promise to their customers and in turn the customers promise to pay their invoices. “Abuse” from a limited number of customers should not be a reason to retract the program. Why not do what most companies do and take action against those who are abusing the service. Speaking of abuse, you have no well documented Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy that clearly defines what exactly Microsoft defines as “abuse”.

Modern computers are coming with less storage then they used to. It was only a few years ago where 500 and 750 GB hard disks were commonplace and offered a large amount of storage for movies, family photos and other content. In 2015, many machines are now shipping with a mere 128 GB drive, while faster it does not offer the amount of storage we used to have. This is where the value of Cloud Storage comes into play.

Although I did not store many videos (all were not copyrighted) on my OneDrive account, I do not see this as abusive to be honest as your initial marketing did highlight this as a use case. You pointed out a customer who was using over 75 TB of space, while extensive, I am wondering if you contacted this customer to see if you can curb their use. I will agree that using OneDrive as a method to allow non-private sharing of copyrighted media files is clearly abuse, If that customer was creating a copy of a DVD they own, I don’t see the problem with this.

Finally, you have failed to offer any value add storage upgrades to your product. I would gladly pay up to $10.00 per month per TB. I did not choose OneDrive because I am cheap, I have no problems paying for a good service, however as you have lost my trust, I am not sure that it can be fixed, even if you can offer some better plans. Punishing all customers for the actions of a small subset is just wrong.

So here is what will be happening. Over the next few months, I will be slowly moving my 1.5 TB of data from OneDrive to my local NAS and switching back to Google Drive. I cannot rely solely on my local NAS as I live in an area that tends to see hurricanes so having a remote backup is critical for me.

Keith I Myers