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Microsoft announced yesterday that they plan to downgrade their various OneDrive storage offerings.
Office 365 Home, Personal and University customers are now limited to 1 TB of OneDrive storage instead of unlimited storage. The 100GB and 200GB OneDrive plans are discontinued. They will be replaced by a 50GB plan for $1.99 per month in early 2016. Free storage will be reduced from 15GB to 5GB for all free users. The camera roll bonus of 15GB will be discontinued.
Microsoft's reasoning for the OneDrive storage offering downgrades: "A small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average."
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Microsoft Announces OneDrive Downgrades
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I'm mentally OVERDRAWN! What's that SIGNPOST up ahead? Where's ROD
STERLING when you really need him?
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday November 04 2015, @07:10PM
I'll clarify: When AT&T started throttling its unlimited users they were making claims that they were downloading more than the average broadband user does. The reason I was clearly against them on the matter, however, was they were throttling people who were nowhere near that level of usage. They were claiming over 150 gigs within a month, but people who were using only a single gig (yes, 1 gig.) were getting throttling notices and suddenly their phones were at speeds comparable to land-line modems.
AT&T was clearly in the wrong. If they had focused on the provably abusive customers, I would probably side with them on the grounds that I don't want an abusive customer nearby interfering with my service. So let's talk about Microsoft for a moment.. but please keep in mind I'm taking their statement at face value, I don't know that there's more to the story as in AT&T's case, nor am I even really familiar with this service. They're claiming that somebody was using 75 TB. If true... actually I'm pretty damned impressed. That seems like a project to me to make that happen. So what should Microsoft have done? If there are trolls out there who actually go out of their way to test what 'unlimited' means, then how does a company advertise a service where they're saying: "Nah, you don't need to worry about limits. Just behave yourself." Do they say: "Unlimited within reason!" Do they say: "Unlimited but we judge when you're abusing it!" Do they say: "23498 trillion bits, you'll never use a fraction of it!" Do they say: "Unlimited*" with a blob of text at the bottom of the screen?
I'm genuinely asking. We're entering a phase where storage and transmission speed is outpacing our ability to consume it. We're already seeing far fewer restrictions on services as a result of it. I'm just wondering what the expectation is since it's clear that people will go out of their way to test the limits of these services.
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(Score: 4, Funny) by DECbot on Wednesday November 04 2015, @07:35PM
They're claiming that somebody was using 75 TB.
Somebody setup a cloud-based swap partition for Firefox memory leaks.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @08:44PM
That seems like a project to me to make that happen
No kidding. I have ~2500 DVD/BR discs I have archived. That is coming in around 38TB. It took about a year just to copy them all. Then to drop them across an internet network connection would take a rather long time. Someone took some serious effort to pull off 75TB...
We're entering a phase where storage and transmission speed is outpacing our ability to consume it.
This is very true. I use a fraction of my movies and music. The media companies are just starting to realize it. They have so much content that 99.999% of it is nearly worthless (yet they still want to charge you 5 dollars to rent 1 movie). When you can access a service like netflix or pandora that has thousands of movies/songs on demand what is the value of buying/renting 1 DVD or 1 more song? It is pretty low. In fact it is nearly non existent. I think we will start to see a lot more of 'pay xyz per month to access catalog abc' and 'catalog' includes millions of items.
If storage goes up radically (and it seems to be) you may even end up with 'buy all of a studios movies' and you just plug it in and do not bother with streaming it. If they get into that idea you will see some serious 'reform' on copyright as well as they will want to cut out the overseas holders of debt. Something like 'buy the 1970s WB catalog' which would include all of the movies from WB in the 1970s.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 04 2015, @08:59PM
"Unlimited" means literally without limits. If there are any limits placed on it whatsoever, it's not unlimited. A 3rd grader could tell you this.
Marketing wankers need to stop trying to have their cake and eat it, too. I would rather be told the number I can use without them getting mad at me, than register for a service that has a secret number I'm never told, then at some point I exceed it and they get pissed.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @09:39PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 05 2015, @12:28AM
Sure.
No, it isn't. "Unlimited" means "we do not put an arbitrary limit on it", not "we provide you to exceed the laws of physics". For example a truly unlimited data plan is one where you could max out your connection 24/7. Of course even when maxing out that connection, you'll only be able to transfer a finite amount of data. But the point is, that amount is given by the inherent limitations of your connection, not by an arbitrarily limit set by the provider.
It's just like "all you can eat". If I'm offered an "all you can eat", I'd expect that I'm allowed to eat as much as I can, not limited by whatever the restaurant owner considers reasonable.
Now it's absolutely OK not to offer unlimited. If you can't provide unlimited, don't offer unlimited. It's as simple as that. But if you do offer unlimited, don't complain about users using it as advertised.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @02:39AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @05:23AM
Every month, you are have an infinite quota of breathable air! You also have an unlimited supply of water (except if you're in CA). You can literally run ALL your taps 24/7 and you'll never run out of it. You won't get an infinite amount of water, but you will get an unlimited amount of water.
Remember kids: Unlimited != Infinite
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @06:59AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @02:05PM
Then the water coming out of your tap will flow slower, and slower, and slower. But it will keep coming.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @03:45PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07 2015, @06:26AM
Yes, the water company will see demand increasing more than they could handle and will use their increased profits to generate more supply. Microsoft offered free unlimited so they'd attract users from other companies and have the chance to convert them into paying customers. It was a calculated risk they specifically took. Sure, if they regret it they should stop offering unlimited storage for any new customers, but changing the terms on existing users should be considered fraud.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 05 2015, @09:01AM
My hard disk. Yes, my hard disk has a finite capacity, but I'm free to use all available capacity. It's not as if when I start filling up ma hard disk to more than 50%, the hard disk manufacturer would come and tell me that I'm not allowed to store more. Now if the hard disk gets full, I'll of course not be able to write more data on it (unless I erase other data first). But that's not an arbitrary limit imposed by the hard disk manufacturer, but simply because there's no space left on the device.
TV broadcasting. If I want I can watch TV 24/7, and the broadcaster will not tell me that it's now time to stop watching TV.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @10:33PM
And the real question: why should that even matter? If those heavy downloaders are downloading at 5pm in their local timezone and causing network congestion, then just add a fair-share rate limiter that throttles them only during the periods of congestion so their downloads don't adversely effect other users, but otherwise ignore them.
Of course, the real reason was profit driven. The CEO's saw opportunities to charge money for more downloading, and so to charge, they first had to cut off the heavy users (since they were the ones they wanted to bill anyway) in order to "convince" them to "pay up".
(Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday November 05 2015, @07:13AM
And the real question: why should that even matter?
For the simple reason that somebody doing that is reducing the quality of service for everybody else at that tower. Even that probably wouldn't be so bad except using that much data with an iPhone is very hard to do, even today, meaning they really went out of their way to pull that off. This happened long before LTE.
Of course, the real reason was profit driven.
Yep. That's why they were fined nearly a hundred million dollars.
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(Score: 1) by scarboni888 on Thursday November 05 2015, @02:20AM
Just purely based on the mathematical definiation of it isn't there ALWAYS someone who is above average with regard to anything you're measuring?
If the average is 100MB and I'm using 110MB that puts me above the average so then I can be considered abusive.
I'm not arguing to say there's no such thing as abusive users however a service provider arguing that 'there are some users who are using ABOVE average amount of services' seems rather meaningless to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @05:20AM
If you offer 'unlimited' and tell me I have 'unlimited', then I expect unlimited. What can I say, I'm a simple man!
It becomes abuse when I use more than what is alloted to me. And at what point am I using more than is alloted to me? I'll tell you when: as soon as you count one farther than infinity, that's when.