Microsoft has announced increasing OneDrive for Business storage from 25GB to 1TB per user in a direct counter to the growth of services like Box and Dropbox. The post that this announcement was made is called Thinking Outside The Box. But as Aaron Levie of Box points out in his own blog post, Microsoft is actually boxing its customers in:

While we haven’t always agreed with everything Microsoft has done, we completely agree with this view on cloud innovation. However, if Microsoft is to make good on *not* creating new “sets of closed islands in the sky,” then they need to drive for further openness in the ecosystem.

By keeping Office 365 users on the closed OneDrive “island,” Microsoft is stranding hundreds of millions of users and customers that have chosen Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and others. And by releasing Office on the iPad without the ability to view or edit documents from any cloud service other than their own, they’re making it harder — not easier – for users to get the most out of their software.

I have to say that I agree with Levie: blocking Office 365 users from viewing or editing files in other cloud services seems a lot more like Ballmer’s Microsoft that Nadella’s. Maybe the philosophy that Nadella has taken with Windows and Office on the iPad — accepting the new world of computing instead of pretending it’s still 2005 — hasn’t trickled down to Office 365 and OneDrive product management yet.

The deluge of Office 365 offerings continues with a second aspect of the Microsoft announcement. Something called Office 365 ProPlus now includes 1TB of OneDrive for Business storage per user as part of an Office 365 ProPlus subscription. Barb Darrow points out this is one of eight Office 365 products not listed on the main product comparison page. Why so many versions and variants?

And it seems that OneDrive for Business is not built on OneDrive, but on Sharepoint.

So, Microsoft is not giving up on file sync-and-share, but they have given up on having a simple, obvious, and transparent product offering, and an open architecture.