We all know the saying, 'If you give a mouse a cookie, it'll want a glass of milk'. Author Laura Numeroff captured a sentiment perfectly with her story. Humanity has put that to the test on numerous occasions. This latest time seems to take the cake. Or perhaps cookie.
When Microsoft introduced its new version of Word, Word365, it came with a few perks. With a subscription to Word 365, you got a free use of the OneDrive cloud service, with unlimited storage. Let me repeat that. Unlimited storage. Imagine every hard drive, every flash stick, every memory card you've ever owned. Still not the same amount of storage offered. I know, unlimited should be descriptive enough, but that's still a lot of space.
Sounds like a good thing, considering that you have to pay monthly to use Word in that transaction. Either $6.99 or $9.99 a month, or $69.99 or $99.99 a year, respectively. Personally, I just bought the program outright, at a slightly higher buy in. But I go years without buying new versions, so it seemed the more logical choice, instead of 70 to 100 bucks a month for the next five years or so. That's just silly when you think how many other services are monthly fees.
Other people thought the unlimited cloud space was a good idea, and they took advantage of it. Boy, did they. So much so that Microsoft had to rethink just how much they wanted to offer. After what they must have deemed as abuse, they've lowered the amount of cloud space your OneDrive subscription gets from unlimited to 1TB. One Terabyte. Now that's still quite a lot, but in today's market it's the equivalent of having one additional hard drive available.
One terabyte is a massive amount of data, especially when you compare it. A byte is 8 bits, those 1's and 0's. A byte is about the size of a single character. A, a byte. 100 bytes is the length of an average sentence. A kilobyte, the next step up, is the equivalent of a lengthy, 19th century novelist's paragraph. 100 KB would be approximately 20 pages worth of text. Above that is megabyte, the former standard in storage. 1.44 megabytes is the same as an old 3.5 floppy (the reason we have a save symbol), or a small book. 600 MB is approximately the size of a CD-ROM. Above that is the amount we all have come to know and love, the gigabyte. The new standard in storage. 1 gigabyte could hold the same information as ten yards of books.
Back in the day, the terabyte seemed impossible. Now, new computers are sold with 1TB hard drives. 1 TB is the equivalent of 1,000 copied of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Ten terabytes could hold the entire Library of Congress. That's the biggest library in the world. And it takes just 10 TB. So how much were people using of the unlimited cloud space offered by Microsoft? Some were using upwards of 75 TB of space. That's seven and a half Libraries of Congress. Currently, 75 TB is an almost inconceivable amount of space. Let met put that into perspective for you. A 3 minute song on iTunes is approximately 11 MB. A 43 minute TV episode is 1.4 GB. A movie could be anywhere from 1.5 GB to 5 GB. A photo is between 1 and 2.5 MB, depending on resolution. A 100 page document is approximately 53 KB. The website CFgearblog did some more calculations, mostly for a flash drive.
So, how much of the basic files would fill 75 TB? Please be sitting down. (All numbers are approximates as file sizes vary) 144,000,000 100-page documents. 14,000,000 3 minute songs. 72,000,000 1MB photos. 53,000 43 minute TV episodes. 25,000 movies.
Outside of a major studio looking to archive their entire back log of movies, music, or television shows, I can't possible imagine needing that amount of storage. Who has 25,000 movies they need to backup? More importantly, how do you have time to watch all of them? I'll understand a photographer wanting to back up their work, but are all 72 million photos worth keeping?
At the end of the day, here's the thing. This is a 50/50 argument. Microsoft should have known better. They opened the flood gates to 'unlimited cloud access'. Now they're regretting it. They should have known that unlimited would be abused. It makes total sense when they point out that 75 TB constitutes $1800 of space in the cloud. Paying $70 a year will never get close to covering that, but that's the system they set up. On the flip side, who in their right mind is filling up that space? Isn't a bit far to fill up 75 TB of cloud space?
Or does this speak more to the American culture on a whole? Americans will always take something if it's free, often even if they don't want it or need it. But it's free, so they take it. Unlimited cloud space? Let's take up every single byte possible. Maybe it's not that bad. Maybe it is a studio executive backing up every song and movie from the past three decades. Or maybe it was a contest. Who can fill up more of Microsoft's servers. Well, whoever you are, congratulations. You broke the system.
Microsoft has scaled back the OneDrive subscription, allowing access to a single terabyte of cloud space. At the maximum. For the maximum fee of $6.99 per month. 50 GB and 100 GB of space will be a subscription of $1.99 a month, while 200 GB will be $3.99. The free storage has also been scaled back, from 15 GB to 5 GB, for all users, new and current. That change will happen early 2016, and comes with a one-year grace period. The 1 TB of space includes Office 365, a lovely bonus. Well, a lovely bonus for a year. Then you have to pay for that too.
For plans and details regarding the changes, the OneDrive blog has all this information.
