Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

All Office 365 subscribers will receive unlimited OneDrive storage for free, Microsoft Corp. announced this morning, putting an end to the previous 1 terabyte limit. In the coming months any home, personal or university subscribers of Office 365 will see the changes to their accounts, although if subscribers don’t feel like waiting they can go to Microsoft’s OneDrive preview site and upgrade early.

In an effort to get in front of rivals like Google Inc. and Dropbox Inc., Microsoft had already increased OneDrive storage from 25GB to 1TB space for business users earlier this year, but now it seems it’s full steam ahead for the tech giant. The recent move puts Microsoft in a vantage position, living up to its assertion that OneDrive will become “the world’s cloud storage leader.”

Chris Jones, the corporate vice president for OneDrive and SharePoint, called the move a “milestone” in cloud storage, adding that “unlimited storage is just one small part of our broader promise to deliver a single experience across work and life that helps people store, sync, share, and collaborate on all the files that are important to them, all while meeting the security and compliance needs of even the most stringent organizations.”

In terms of price wars, Microsoft is also ahead of the game. While Google and Dropbox charge $9.99 a month for 1TB of storage, or $10 a month for Google’s Drive for Work business ‘unlimited space’ package, Microsoft is offering OneDrive storage for PC, Mac, and smartphones for just $6.99 per month. It’s more than likely that in the coming months Google and Dropbox will come back with a deal of their own, as consumer cloud pricing trends take their cues from the enterprise.

photo credit Steve Mohundro via photopin cc