I received an email from Microsoft this morning informing me of upcoming changes to my Microsoft 365 subscription.
Two of the changes relate to the AI service, which are irrelevant as far as I am concerned because I don’t use it or Copilot. The change that caught my eye, and caused me to swear, was the announcement that my cloud storage allowance will change from 1 TB per person to 2 TB of shared storage.
Er, hello, a Microsoft 365 Family plan can have up to six people enrolled in it – that means that currently six people can use up to 6TB of cloud storage; 1TB per person. Under the new regime, those six people will have to share just 2TB – a 66.6% reduction in storage space.
In my situation, I have four family members enrolled in the plan, myself and three others; so currently we can use up to 4TB of cloud storage, 1TB each. With the new plan, we have to share just 2TB of cloud storage – a 50% reduction to what we can currently have.
Of course Microsoft is putting an Orwellian Newspeak spin on this claiming that this gives us “more flexible cloud storage”, which is simply contemptible – they must think we are idiots not to see this for what it is – a price hike far above simply the cost of inflation.
I’ll have to do a check to see how much cloud storage we are using collectively at the moment – I know that I have over 70% of my 1TB used. Perhaps I need to plan to make more use of local server storage. There was a time when I was using Windows Home Server quite happily for this, but of course Microsoft killed that product 10 years ago…
Microsoft does it again – snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, whilst giving the two-finger salute to its customers.
