Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mynameisvlad 3171 days ago
OneDrive has been around for 10 years and we're one of the best known companies for backwards compatibility and keeping things far past their prime (Hotmail/Outlook.com, for instance, which has been out for 21 years, albeit only 20 under the company.)

What makes you think it's going to be surprise-discontinued?

2 comments

Probably more detail than I can really articulate, but I've lately perceived a shift in how Microsoft wants to support legacy and maybe getting more aggressive in taking a stance in eliminating some.

Right now Microsoft seems really high on cloud, particularly as a means to make Office a subscription product (which helps with legacy support, as in the long run, there are no legacy versions to support in this model). From that respect, I don't think OneDrive is at any risk of ceasing to be a product, but I do think they might yo-yo the storage quotas and things like that. Didn't they do that with SkyDrive a while back?

I'd certainly rate their risk lower than Google, which does have a history of abandoning things that people really like.

Dropbox and Apple are lowest risk for me, but for two different reasons. For Dropbox, it is their product, and they seem to make money. For Apple, it's baked into their user experience, and they tend to focus on that - rather than cut costs and compete on price, they'll make it more expensive if they need to, but it'll probably continue to work well.

You are right, your quota will depend on when you got the account and what you did. At various times, we had 5, 7, 15, and 25GB for free. When the big nerf happened from 25 to 7 (I think that's the one you're talking about), existing accounts could opt in to 25GB (personally, was not a fan that it was opt-in) for life. Same thing happened to the O365 offering, nerfed from unlimited to 1TB which is more reasonable, I don't know why anyone would offer unlimited storage honestly, that's just an open call for abuse.

Edit: For me, after Apple actually decided to integrate iCloud into macOS, I felt more secure about it staying, but before that it definitely felt like a pet project that might be abandoned. I still don't fully trust it with my documents, but since I have an iPhone, I have well over 15GB of photos and videos uploaded that I'd like to see stay for a while. :)

Perhaps you'll decide to buy a competitor like Dropbox, choose their product as the one true product and close down OneDrive. Like you bought Skype and shut down MSN Messenger.

That said, it probably won't happen overnight and it's not that difficult to migrate from OneDrive to Google Drive or such. Lock-in is low.

I mean, yeah, no product will last forever. MSN Messenger was alive for 14 years and was slowly dying as users were moving on to other services. At a certain point, it becomes unprofitable to keep sustaining a service. But even when it did get discontinued, all Messenger accounts and their contacts got transferred to the Skype service. If you still wanted to talk to the same people, you could just through a different client. You could sign in to Skype with your same credentials and talk to the same people for over a year before that happened, too, to give people time to adjust.

Groove Music is an even more recent example. Yes, the service is going away, and certain parts of the deprecation might be annoying (you have to download all purchased music before the end of the year, for instance) but all accounts can be migrated to Spotify, a previous competitor of the service. It's not like we left people completely stranded without any options.