You can't stretch the definition of unlimited. There is literaly no amount that would stretch it. If you advertise unlimited storage, you are bending the truth, since there is no such thing as unlimited disk space. I don't see how anyone can blame the data hoarders here. Where I live, if you advertise for something that you cannot deliver, it's called fraud and you can get sued for it. I just don't see why they feel the need to lie to customers like that.
Where do you live, and how was OneDrive advertised there? Just curious.
There was some UK court case where the ruling agrees with what you said. However, both then and now I disagree with it.
The reason is it is absolutely wrong in terms of language:
unlimited - without limits
reasonable use - use limited to a reasonable amount
Why not just say there is a 5GB limit? That would be clear, fair and not at all misleading.
I do think that there should be segmented contracts with numerical ranges in to avoid idiots.
No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. There are maybe a handful of organizations outside of Microsoft that have a non-laughable chance of estimating A) cost of online storage to microsoft B) number of users C) distribution of storage used by their userbase D) cost of bandwidth E) typical bandwidth profile of users F) how much money Microsoft is willing to spend on storage as a loss leader.
And then there is the un-estimateable wildcard: G) what number will "sound too big" to sysadmins and/or PMs once they see it on their metrics dashboard.
"Unlimited" is a scam to avoid vocalizing the secret maximum and hoping that users have more conservative estimates of the secret maximum than it's actual value.
And there is a huge incentive for users to guess conservativly at the maximum, because as soon as one person doesn't everyone else will blame them for "shitting in the pool and getting the whole thing canned"
I don't think that matters.
> "Unlimited" is a scam
Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of. I have unlimited checking and it's not a scam but there are obvious limits, if I wrote a million checks for 1 cent they would either close my account or change the terms. Writing a million checks is not a reasonable use case though, that would be me shitting in the pool.
That's actually just nonsense. Well, of course you can't get a million dollars worth of anything for 5 dollars. But the question is not how many dollars worth of whatever you can get per dollar (that's one dollar, duh), but how much of whatever you can get. And how do you find out how much that is? You look at market prices. You look at what offers there are in the market. Now, if the offers in the market only specify a price, but not what you get for it, you can't actually find out what a unit of whatever is worth.
> just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of.
That's a bullshit comparison. Buffets don't offer unlimited food, they offer as much as you can eat, which is very well constrained by basic human physiology and metabolism. "Storage for your data" has no such inherent limit, but completely depends on what you happen to use it for. "Unlimited" is not the same thing as "limit not specified as an explicit number".
Unlimited SOUNDS better than any given number because it says you wont have to worry about usage. If you said 5TB of usage this might have the same connotations for most users however it doesn't communicate this fact as well.
However once you start playing games with language. Saying one thing in large print and the exact opposite in the fine print or depending on what different people think is reasonable it becomes harder to define what is permissible.
The former: if everyone just played along and used things reasonably we would still be benefiting from cheap storage.
The latter: stop playing games, "unlimited" is an unacceptable lie and we will push you into admitting it.
It devalues the products of people that aren't bullshitting you. Say with fake-unlimited the "real limit" is 4TB before they start terminating you, but a different provider provides 5TB of capacity.
Because the former is allowed to outright lie, there is no way for the latter to effectively communicate that they are in fact offering a better product, instead they too have to make a bullshit "fake unlimited" claim to compete. Now because nobody has to actually back their claims with anything, they are infact massively incentivised to cut the "real storage" limits, because it will cut their costs, and they can still keep making the same claims.
Its a market for lemons[1] race to the bottom, and everyone loses, producer and consumer because scamming liars cannot be reliably assessed beforehand. So consumers lose faith in the entire market segment, and providers offering actual legitimate services become unsustainable.
Here's what a sane person would do: retain the 10GB. Disallow any further upload while usage is above 100% (Dropbox doed this).
No, this isn't what Microsoft is doing. I used to think one drive was unaffected by all the bs surrounding one drive for business but no. This is a dysfunctional company.
Now that I think about it, it gives me pause about why I should even consider Microsoft technology like dot net core. They'll find some way to screw you over even if it doesn't benefit them to do so.
Edit: sane
Ubuntu is a fine OS.
Oh and I've given up on anything named one drive forever. The time am can't be trusted with anything worth anything.
In the end, it's a marketing term meaning "we don't arbitrarily set a numeric limit like 50GB", not that it can never possibly under any circumstances run into any kind of physical or practical limit.
2. Work median usage per customer
3. Set new limit below median
4. Profit
Now you don't have to deal with r/datahorder users.
OneDrive and Dropbox have been totally opposite experiences to me, heaven and hell. Also after more than a year with OneDrive I passionately despise it. It truly is Internet Explorer of cloud storages.
I don't use Windows a lot myself but you're not the first person I hear voicing this concern and postponing updates to avoid risking breaking something critical. This is a very bad precedent for Microsoft to set. At least it'll keep the ransomware and antivirus devs busy.
Such a surprise they started just forcing upgrades..
That was brief and sadly disappeared. However OD is still cheaper than DropBox for 1TB of storage and comes with Office. I'd still mark that as a pretty good deal since most people are required to have Office around.
As a long-term OneDrive (SkyDrive, Windows Live Mesh, FolderShare) user, it has been really disappointing to see features come, go, then come back. I can't upgrade operating systems or even update the app without fear of losing critical features.
For example, being able to transparently access networked (not locally downloaded) files used to be super easy, then it went away, and is now apparently coming back.
Similarly, Windows Live Mesh had really good versioning, a really useful remote access service, and really cool collaboration tools. Then it went away and has never been replaced.
OneDrive used to have 25Gb storage for free; that was a really good deal. Then it went to unlimited storage for Office users, but then they stopped that for no good reason.
tl;dr I'm not going to be a OneDrive customer for much longer. Microsoft makes it really hard to be a fan of their products. :(