I have 170 gigs and apparently I forgot I bought 20 gigs last summer that is up now for a monthly renewal of $0.78. Huh.
Disregarding that, the most impressive thing about Microsoft that has yet to die is their ability to make you buy their products or at least make it such a way that you're doing yourself a disservice by not using one of their products/services. I was looking at the OneDrive subscription plans and the Office 365 bundle was shown for 10 dollars a month with 1 whopping TERABYTE, of cloud storage PER USER. Five freaking terabytes of storage! If their measurement of gigs is a gigabyte, per gig that costs about $0.00214838709677419354838709677419. If gigabit, $0.001998. Not even a penny per gig! That's not even counting FIVE seats of Office for a Windows (or mac) PC meaning desktop or laptop; AND from what I gather FIVE Windows tablets (or ipads but that's silly)! They're literally throwing SO much at you in that bundle for $99 a year I'm literally considering calling up some friends if they want to chip in for this! ('o') So much storage!! But it is cloud....
So if we were to look at this as a local, perpetual type setup, it's significant. If one were to buy five single 1 TB hard drive, it would be $135 per drive, $625 altogether (not considering NAS). Then there's Office, five seats of Pro Plus 2013 comes out to a decent sum of $2,500. The Windows tablets, I'm going to assume this means EVERY Windows tablet running Office as Win32 and not WinRT since that's not yet out; that's another $2,500 so a solid $5,000 for 10 seats of Office. With the storage and Office, $5,625.
In comparison, Office 365 and OneDrive together yearly is $99.99. This means it would LITERALLY, if the math is correct, 56 years to match up to the perpetual license and hard drives. That doesn't consider the cost of replacing those five hard drives every 10ish years or so, and the fact that Office 2013 Pro Plus wouldn't even be supported or used 10-15 years from now. But if one did at current prices...
In five decades, considering a new version of Office and hard drives every 10 years: $28,125. And let's not even talk about the 60 Skype minutes every month...
For some reason I feel like I did the math wrong but I didn't, that's insane. I do believe I just talked myself into this...
I really wish they didn't remove the annual OneDrive subscription. I'd much rather pay a lump sum once a year versus be hit every month. Why they chose this monthly route? Obviously to make money off the subscriptions, to obviously deter the fact they might be giving Windows 9 free to about 60% of their user base and/or at least make Windows free for use on baby tablets.
Clever them.