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Users of Dropbox can take advantage of 100GB of free OneDrive cloud storage though a Microsoft promotional deal.
This latest storage giveaway from Microsoft appears available for all, unlike the US-only Bing Rewards scheme announced earlier in February. Yet it’s an interesting play to get more users to sign up for OneDrive, which is already free and unlimited to Office 365 subscribers.
Dropbox users can verify they have an account by saving a PDF file entitled “Get Started With OneDrive” into their Dropbox folder.
The partnership between Dropbox and Microsoft, first announced in November, has been interesting to say the least. At the time, Dropbox’s perceived weaknesses in enterprise and mobile was addressed by moving in with Microsoft and gaining greater ground on Windows Mobile, with an updated version released earlier in February.
Previous announcements from either vendor were all relatively equal, yet this release certainly gives more power to Microsoft, which over the past 12 months has been ramping up access to OneDrive. It’s clearly part of CEO Satya Nadella’s strategy to give cloud storage to as many users as possible; as he put it in March 2014 when unveiling Office 365 for iPads: “Cloud that is not connected to devices is latent potential. A device which is not connected to the cloud just cannot complete the scenarios.”
The typical mindset, when comparing companies such as Microsoft handing out cloud storage like confetti, is to compare against the likes of Dropbox and Box, traditional standalone storage vendors. This isn’t the case now, of course, as Box has a litany of collaboration tools up its sleeve – Aaron Levie, the Box CEO, went as far to note that increasingly commoditised storage benefits his company’s infrastructure costs, calling it “one of the misunderstood dynamics” of his business.
The offer is limited to the first 10 million Dropbox users, and can be found here.