Microsoft Launches OneDrive, Gives Away Free Storage

After months of hemming, hawing, and finally waiting, Microsoft has at long last launched their new cloud storage service, OneDrive, which replaces the now defunct SkyDrive service following a lengthy legal battle with BSkyB. The new service has all the features and functionality that customers have come to appreciate from the service, including desktop syncing, public sharing, Office Web integration, sharing, and more. To celebrate the launch, Microsoft is shipping the service with a slightly tweaked web experience, giving the launch of OneDrive a sense that it’s at least a little more important than a simple name change.

What’s more, Microsoft seems to be in the giving mood today – if you’re lucky, signing into OneDrive today will land you 100GB of free storage for life, as seen in the image above. That’s on top of the 7GB of free space you get just for signing up, and combined with any previous space your old SkyDrive account may have netted you; my primary account is now up to 127GB of free storage for a year thanks to this promotion. It’s not clear if all users are getting the extra space today – there have been conflicting reports suggesting perhaps not – but it can’t hurt to try if you think you might be interested in the service.

Microsoft is also updating its Android application to support some new functionality today, with an update to the existing iOS application expected to drop sometime in the future. So I’m curious – is this enough to get you to switch from Dropbox at long last? Or are you happy not handing all of your sensitive data over to Microsoft’s servers? Let us know what you think in the comments!