This week, Microsoft announced some updates to Windows Live Hotmail, including 5 GB of free storage.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Windows Live SkyDrive has a relatively measly 500 MB of storage. Why isn’t Microsoft’s online storage integrated?
If Microsoft is really trying to create something OS-like for the Internet, why not start with the data stores?
Don’t get me wrong, the Live team is adding some nice features like drag and drop and photo previews to SkyDrive, however…
It just seems to me that Microsoft should be moving toward an integrated store, rather than having 5 GB here for mail, 500 MB here for most other things, and 3 MB there for MSN Groups, along with however much storage you can get for free to host a Web site.
Windows Live is already complicated and seems disparate enough. I should be able to map everything to one Live:\ drive, even if e-mails open up in Hotmail and photos in Live Photo Gallery upon clicking on my online items.
To me, the sensible thing to do would be to make Live SkyDrive much bigger, and to allow Microsoft’s other online storage locations to plug into it like a hub.
So why does Windows Live SkyDrive only have 500 MB of storage today?
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Well that just wouldn’t work at all… See, the whole web-based email storage thing is total crap. No one is going to use 5 GB of storage for their email, particularly with the types of file-size restrictions they put in place. It’s like overselling on hosting: you promise people x, but you know that y% of them aren’t going to use it, so you can fit z% more users on your existing infrastructure.
If they let you use that same 5 GB of storage for other files through SkyDrive, it would totally eat their infrastructure because people *would* use it there.
While they can throw around big numbers that sound impressive for webmail without any fear of having to beef up their infrastructure, the same isn’t true for online file storage.