Apple(s AAPL) recently emailed former MobileMe customers to remind them that their days of using a complimentary 20 GB of cloud storage would soon be coming to an end.
Following the email prompt, Microsoft(s MSFT) is hoping to lure Apple’s irked customers away from iCloud and over to its own rival service, SkyDrive.
Microsoft’s cloud service, which will soon be undergoing a global name change, currently offers a free 7 GB account, but the SkyDrive team announced Wednesday via Twitter that it will offer former MobileMe users a year’s worth of bonus storage (15 GB) for free.
Did Apple cancel your extra MobileMe storage? Fwd the downgrade email to [email protected] for an extra 15GB of SkyDrive for 1 year
— OneDrive (@onedrive) August 7, 2013
Affected customers are prompted to contact Microsoft at a special email address in order to claim the additional space.
MobileMe users were originally graced with extra iCloud storage when Apple decided to shutter the spurned online subscription service last year.
Whereas new iCloud users only receive 5GB of free data storage, former MobileMe customers were offered 20 GB to use as they pleased. Now, Apple is preparing to remove the bonus free storage come Sept. 30, forcing one-time MobileMe users to either pay up or downsize.
Microsoft’s offer comes at a time when former MobileMe users find themselves stuck in the inconvenient position of having to decide to pay upto $40 a year for a similar storage deal from Apple, or reduce their cloud data usage by around 15 GB.
Whether Microsoft’s offer will appease MobileMe customers of old remains to be seen. However, it’s a choice between sorting your data before Apple pulls the plug in September, or signing up for SkyDrive and dealing with the same problem a year from now when Microsoft’s offer expires.
Either way, the consumer cloud wars rage on.
