Microsoft on Monday declared the race for supremacy of the cloud on by sinking prices for online storage and opening more storage space on the company’s servers.
Internet users who want to store their photos, videos and other data can look forward to the changes, which take affect next month, said Omar Shahine, group programme manager for OneDrive.com, at his blog.
The amount of free storage space offered to OneDrive users will increase from 7 gigabytes to 15 gigabytes, Shahine said. The subscription for 100 gigabytes of storage will be $1.99 monthly, down from $7.49 and $3.99 for 200 gigabytes, previously $11.49.
“We believe providing 15 gigabytes for free right out of the gate – with no hoops to jump through – will make it much easier for people to have their documents, videos, and photos available in one place,” Shahine wrote at the blog.
All versions of Office 365 will come with 1 terabyte of OneDrive storage instead of the current 20 gigabytes, he said. Current contracts will be automatically changed over to the new offers.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s new chief executive, hopes to make Microsoft more independent of the Windows operating system in light of shrinking PC sales.
In a strategy aimed at rivals Apple, Google and Amazon, it has come up with the slogan Mobile-first, Cloud-first. Data and applications will be accessible from any device, even ones made by competitors, over the internet. What’s far more important to Nadella is that the services run on Microsoft servers.
Google and Apple have already lowered prices for their online storage services. Amazon is making space for private customers on its servers, but the majority of its cloud storage business is with business customers that need processing power and storage for their websites.
The price war among the technology heavyweights is putting pressure on smaller storage services such as Dropbox and Box.