Microsoft has been making huge improvements to its cloud storage service SkyDrive lately. Over the past year it has integrated it into Windows Phone Mango, improved its capabilities significantly with HTML5 video support and released apps for Windows Phone and iOS.
Now, a report from Brazilian site Gemind indicates that we’ll be seeing expanded storage tiers and desktop apps for Windows and Mac OS X. The site shares a screenshot from the web interface of SkyDrive that clearly advertises downloadable clients for Windows and Mac. It notes that this is not the LiveMesh product, and explicitly refers to SkyDrive.
On top of the possible clients for Mac and Windows, there are also some new pricing tiers reveled, above and beyond the standard 25GB of free storage. These offer 20, 50 or 100GB more storage for a fee, using the Brazilian Real figures given in the screenshot, this works out to, roughly:
- +20 for $11/yr
- +50 for $27/yr
- +100 for $54/yr
The additional tiers of pricing should make storage hounds happy, and those desktop apps should make accessing your SkyDrive easier and faster than the web interface. Microsoft is clearly positioning SkyDrive as a competitor for Dropbox and Apple’s iCloud, so all of the love it is getting recently isn’t much of a surprise.
If Microsoft wants the cloud to be a big part of its future, it can’t simply rely on Amazon or a third-party to bail it out, it needs to roll its own and make sure that it is as easy as possible to use on any platform. So far, it seems to be doing a good job of it.
SkyDrive users, what do you think, do these new tiers make you happy? How many of you are using the service on a Mac?
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