Where Is Microsoft's Holiday Spirit?

I'm here to remind you there are only a few more shopping days before Christmas — just a few more days to buy me that perfect gift and send it to me.

I've got an Amazon wish list out there. Buy early and buy often. It's all about the Christmas spirit, right?

And while you're doing that — you've got Amazon open or whatever site you're going buy me stuff at like KCChiefs.com or whatever — go over to ToddKlindt.com and read my blog. I've been very active in my blog lately.

(Ed. Note: Big sigh. Let's move on, Todd.)

'Horrible, Horrible Thing'

A month or so ago Microsoft did a horrible, horrible marketing thing. It said "Hey, remember that time we told you we were going to give you unlimited OneDrive consumer — OneDrive for Pleasure — storage? Well, that time that we said that we didn't mean that and we're not going to give you unlimited OneDrive Consumer.

"And not only are we not going to give you unlimited OneDrive Consumer: We're going to take back every other single bonus and way that you guys use to get more storage and everybody's going to 5GB, no matter what. End of story."

Ahhh. Microsoft. Microsoft. Microsoft.

So of course everybody was very angry. A lot of people like myself that had started moving over to OneDrive. Windows 8 and 8.1 make extensive use of OneDrive and people were slowly starting to use it.

And then Microsoft goes and pulls one of these numbers. Ridiculous.

We're Not Gonna Take This

Someone started a OneDrive user forum and it had — last I checked — 72,000 people complaining on it … something like that. So last week Microsoft announced it was rethinking some of this.

It announced on the user forum saying that they have heard our pleas, but they were sticking to their guns. They are still going to take the unlimited away and honestly nobody blames the company for that.

But I think where they really screwed up was cutting everybody off from bonus offers. When I signed up for OneDrive, whenever it was, the deal was you got 15GB for free. And they weren't even going to honor that. They were just going to give everybody 5GB for free.

That was a horrible maneuver. So now Microsoft is going to give us two things: if you go out to preview.one drive.com/bonus and sign up, then Microsoft is basically going to do what it should have done all along. It's going to let you keep whatever your current base storage quota is. So for me, that's 15GB. Everybody won't get retroactively moved back to 5GB.

New folks, I think, will only get 5GB. But those of us who started with something larger can keep that.

Just Keep It

Another thing Microsoft did: If you signed up on your smartphone — I did it on a Windows Phone, so I'm not sure if it works for other platforms or not — if you signed up to have your pictures automatically uploaded to OneDrive, you got a camera roll bonus.

It was another 15GB. Microsoft was initially going to take that away as well. It has since relented on that, so you also get to keep that if you go out to preview.one drive.com/bonus.

You have to do this by Jan. 31, which is 10 days after my birthday. So there's plenty of time to buy me lots of birthday presents.

Why Microsoft doesn't just automatically do this is a mystery. I don't understand. It's really screwed this up a whole bunch.

If you're curious what kind of storage you have and what your base quota is and all those crazy things, go to OneDrive. In the upper right-hand corner, hit the gear. And then go to options and it'll show you your base quota and all those things.

Possible Solution

One thing I want to mention — I have 15GB for this and 15GB for that. I got some space when I bought my Surface Pro. I got some space with the Xbox music thing. I also have 1TB from Office 365 Home.

That was something I got when I bought the whole stack of you know, 47 tablets a year or so ago. Each one of those came with Office 365 Home and that adds a terabyte of drive space to your OneDrive.

So I've got that terabyte, which will stay as well. If you want, you can buy Office 365 Home, which is $100 a year. It comes with a terabyte of drive space and also gives you Word and Excel and a whole bunch of things including Skype.

The other thing you can do is you can do is you can buy the Microsoft Work & Place Bundle.

That's something Microsoft announced here a while back. I don't know how long that's going to be in effect, but for $150 you get Office 365 Home, which is five user licenses, I believe, or five machines or five Lords a leaping. I can't keep up. But there's five of something in there. You can work out 5TB of storage, one way or another.

You get Office 365 Home. You get Xbox live gold. You get Skype unlimited world calling and Skype Wi-Fi. And you get a $60 bonus gift card to use for Microsoft Windows apps for music, videos, games, whatever. And you get all that for $150.