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Microsoft continues to give away OneDrive storage like it is candy.  Earlier today I post about Bing Rewards customers globally getting a free 100GB of storage just by signing up.  Now Redmond has extended an offer of an additional 100GB of storage for those of you with a Dropbox account.  While Microsoft and Dropbox have done a lot of work together over these past few months including bringing an official Dropbox app to Windows and Windows Phone 8.1, they are still competitors and Microsoft clearly is showing they intend to win as many customers to their cloud storage service as possible.

Here is the deal:  First, you have to have an active Dropbox account.  If you don’t have one because you already use OneDrive, no problem.  Go open a free 2GB account at Dropbox.  I’ll wait while you go do that….

At the beginning of February, Microsoft made a great offer to Bing Rewards members here in the United States by giving them 100GB of OneDrive storage for the next two years with a simple mouse click.  Now they have extended that offer globally so everyone can take part.  For those who aren’t familiar with Bing Rewards, it is a point-based system of rewards that you get for using Bing for searches on your PC or mobile device.  On your mobile that can be through Cortana on Windows Phone or the Bing apps on iOS and Android.  It’s free to join and with the 100GB of storage on OneDrive, its a double incentive to join.  There is no cost associated with it.

Last month the US carrier AT&T announced a new Rollover Data plan for all of their existing customers.  The plan basically gives you the unused data from your last month and rolls those gigabytes over to the current month.  The plan started taking effect for customers on January 25, 2014 and if your billing cycle has happened since then, you have Rollover Data on your account.  By-the-way, there is no sign up process for this features.  It is for every AT&T customer who has a qualifying plan which is all of the monthly billing plans.

As part of that announcement, AT&T indicated that the myAT&T app for Windows Phone, iOS and Android would all be updated to reflect this rollover data.  That is now in the app which you can download for free from the Windows Phone Store.

myAT&T for Windows Phone – Free – Download Now

As we enter into 2015, Microsoft is on the verge of recapturing some of the cool factor that they lost nearly a decade ago to the likes of Apple and Google.  No longer is the Redmond company looked at as the “Necessary Evil” or “800 Pound Gorilla” but rather a new view of the company has slowly but steadily taking hold.  That is a company that provides services, software and solutions that you don’t necessarily have to add the additional costs of hardware to run.  Microsoft is full-on running to the Cloud and we as consumers will see the benefits but so will the Enterprise.  This run to the Cloud also has forced Microsoft to in many ways completely rethink their income streams.  No longer, especially in the consumer space, is the company able by-and-large to charge a flat fee for software.  Consumers have become conditioned to the App World and subscriptions and actually Microsoft probably has Apple to thank for that.

But how do you shift a company that has long been charging for software as a one-time license fee to a Software as a Service (SaaS) or Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) model without going bankrupt doing it and not alienating your customer base, particularly in the Enterprise?  Carefully.  Very carefully.  The challenge for Microsoft isn’t so much the consumer end of the equation.  It is the Enterprise.  Corporations large and small have for decades purchased software, installed in on hardware and paid maintenance on that software to keep it up-to-date and to get access to the latest version.  Complicating this matter has been Microsoft’s eye watering number of SKUs for what seemingly is the same product.  Even the most savvy Enterprise has been caught out by getting incorrect versions of product or, worse, been out of license compliance unbeknownst to them. While a lot of what Microsoft has been driving to the Cloud has been consumer focused, there is also a lot moving there for Enterprises which should also benefit them in the long run.