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Amazon is offering customers an unlimited one year cloud storage deal for $5 to tie in with its Black Friday promotions.
The deal, which would normally cost users $59.99, may be of most interest to Microsoft customers, after the company recently shuttered its unlimited OneDrive plans. In that instance, a few spoiled it for the many; a company blog post explained “a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings…in some instances exceed[ing] 75 TB per user, or 14,000 times the average.” Microsoft has since decided to cap each OneDrive account to 1 TB.
No such problems for Amazon users; as the company explains, “there’s no limit to how many files you can upload, and we’ll never change or reduce the resolution of your images.” For those who are primarily uploading photos to their storage – a key problem for many of those who complained about OneDrive – Amazon has an unlimited $11.99 per year offering, again with the carrot of a free trial. For those who do take up the offer, the price for unlimited storage goes back to $59.99 after a year.
Evidently, this is just a short term customer gain strategy from Amazon to tie in with Black Friday – if one is so inclined the official Black Friday page has a plethora of deals – but longer term, Microsoft’s decision to halt its unlimited OneDrive accounts should not be seen as an admission of failure. That was the view of Brian Taptich, the CEO of developer-focused cloud storage provider Bitcasa, whose company made a similar decision in 2014 when it found businesses were taking advantage of their plan.
“I suspect Microsoft just learned that, however theoretical models may have supported the efficacy of offering unlimited storage of a fixed – and low – fee, in the almost entirely frictionless world of data transfer, the first users who show up to the all you can eat buffet break the model with their unimaginable volumes of data,” he said.
You can find out more about the Amazon deal here.
