More SkyDrive news it seems. Microsoft’s soon-to-be-renamed cloud storage service has been in the news today for not so bright reasons. Redmond just decided to rebrand SkyDrive following a trademark case settlement.
But while it may still be a while until we find out about what Microsoft decides to call the service (here’s hoping they do some solid paperwork this time around), that is not stopping the industrious SkyDrive team to enhance the service for end users.
The company very recently announced a series of changes to provide users with support for popular new file types, along with additional editing and sharing capabilities.
But it appears that plenty of other changes are also planned for the near future.
Omar Shahine from the SkyDrive team, along with Mona Akmal, yesterday took on an AMA session on Reddit. And responding to user inquiries, he confirmed that Microsoft was looking at means to increase the 2GB file size limit currently in effect on the cloud service:
“I can’t comment about specifics here, but it’s something we are looking at. The reason we don’t support 2 GB is that when we designed the system 7 years ago we thought 2 GB was really big. Turns out it’s not.”
Okay, 2GB is not really big — and neither is 20GB.
The sooner this is understood the better. The downright frantic (and sometimes scary) pace at which technology is developing it does not take all that long for limits like these to be shattered.
Besides, 2GB is really on the lower side of thing when you take into account many file hosting websites offer much more, even up to 10 or 15GB for users. Sure, not everyone always uploads files this large, but having options never hurt anybody.
Anyway, this is good news. And it is not often teams from Microsoft talk about planned features in public, but Omar also confirmed that the company was actively working on increasing the limit of total storage that users can enjoy beyond the 100GB mark — currently the highest availed tier.
This should, again, be encouraging news for pro and power users.
Small and large changes like these will only help the Microsoft become an undisputed leader it so readily prides itself on. Cloud is one area that Redmond is all set to conquer, and it is taking notable strides in this dynamic new field regularly. Besides, as the saying goes, every little bit helps.
