In the last few months I read a really insightful article that I wish I could find again; the article explained about a new-ish phenomenon called- 'CloudWashing'. With this, different technology service providers would call various components of their services a cloud based product. I understand the temptation behind this as cloud is the most exciting component of technology to date. Yet, calling a part of your service cloud or cloud-based, when it isn't, just leaves a large portion of the general populace utterly confused as to what cloud computing actually is.
I bring this up because I feel that genuine cloud vendors are falling trap to the same bad practice when calling their offering 'unlimited'.
When I was a teenager, I used to go with friends to restaurants with 'all you can eat' buffets and see just how much we can eat before getting kicked out. Granted, we didn't exactly go to the most expensive places around. But still, we never found a restaurant that 'all you can eat' actually did what it said on the tin. Fast forward fifteen years, and take note of the unlimited bandwidth claims of the internet industry. Weather it is my home wifi or my mobile phone, there is a point in the month, every single month, that my internet s-l-o-w-s w-a-y d-o-w-n. For my mobile it is around the 6GB mark, which granted is better than the next option down of 2GB, but still not what I wanted.
The reason I bring this up (other than taking a fun trip down memory lane,) is because Microsoft just changed the cloud storage game. A number of cloud storage providers would offer fixed storage packages on a sliding scale according to space needed, with unlimited being the premium option. Recently, Microsoft threw that model out the window and decided to offer unlimited storage as a feature of their service, and not as the service in and of itself.
This is a new development so I will wait to see if they will actually put their money where their mouth is and be the first provider (at least from my experience) to offer a truly unlimited storage service.
As before- if you found this interesting or agree/disagree with anything I wrote here, please let me know in the comments below!
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