Bad Free Deals–Temporary Cloud Storage

Lots of companies give away things which are free or discounted as part of a marketing ploy to actually entice consumers to spend more. There’s nothing really wrong with that, but buyer beware. An offer from Microsoft shows the type of deal I find among the most worthless–temporary free cloud storage. Microsoft has a promotion offering 20 GB of extra SkyDrive storage for one year.

Extra cloud storage is always welcome. (Anyone want to pick up a Dropbox account from my referral  so we both get extra storage?) But what do you do with extra storage which is good for only one year? If you were already going to pay for the extra storage, then it does save you one year’s payment. Otherwise people aren’t very likely to store a lot of material in the cloud and then let it all be deleted a year later.

I don’t mean to pick on Microsoft here. This is a common type of promotion. It just happened that I ran across a post on this offer from Microsoft today.

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