Microsoft Corp said it will increase its cloud storage offering for business users 40-fold as it makes a case for businesses buying an all-in-one product from itself rather than buying technology “piecemeal” from multiple sellers.
“The era of making isolated, single-solution decisions is rapidly coming to a close,” Microsoft Office Division corporate vice president John Case wrote.
Microsoft on Monday raised its OneDrive for Business storage to 1TB per user from 25GB.
Microsoft’s pitch to be the one-stop destination for companies looking to buy technology runs against efforts by smaller rivals such as Box and Dropbox that offer one or two specialized services.
Microsoft did not name its rivals, but made a reference to them in the headline of its blog post titled “Thinking outside the box.”
A Dropbox spokeswoman declined to comment on the move.
Box chief executive Aaron Levie fired back in a blog post, criticizing Microsoft for keeping its storage software “closed” and making it difficult for users to move their data between different services.
“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,” Levie wrote after Microsoft’s move.
Silicon Valley’s Dropbox has proved a hit with consumers and boasts more than 200 million users six years after it was started.
It has undergone tremendous growth amid the meteoric rise of cloud, which is expected to continue booming alongside mobile computing.
While Dropbox won plaudits for its ease-of-use and gained traction among individual users, Levie focused Box in recent years toward catering to corporate customers who demanded greater levels of administrative control and security.
Both companies are expected to go public in the coming months.
Cloud-based computing services have become increasingly popular among both cash-strapped tech startups and larger companies, which rely on computers owned and operated by the likes of Amazon.com Inc and Google Inc.
Investors are excited about Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella’s focus on mobile and cloud computing, designed to take Microsoft beyond its traditional PC-based Windows business.
Microsoft saw Nadella’s emphasis on cloud computing help its server software business in the third quarter, while a softer-than-expected decline in PC sales limited damage to the bottom line.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
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