After nearly a year of beta testing, Microsoft has finally made its Windows Live SkyDrive available to Australia. What is it? It is a free online storage option that is attached to your existing Windows Live Hotmail email account.
Often Australia is last on the list of innovations such as SkyDive (in fact, the other parts of the Windows Live package won’t get to Australia for several months). However, Australia was included in the massive rollout of the new service which encompassed nearly 40 countries.
The service brings with it the usually clunky Microsoft execution and appearance. Not only is it cluttered and square, it tries to hold you on the page instead of allowing you to surf at will while you are uploading (according to our source, the upload did work just fine when he navigated away, in spite of dire warnings from the pop up window).
The other concerns with the service lie in its Terms and Conditions. Many of the countries it is being released in won’t notice that the Terms and Conditions for several of them are based out of Singapore laws instead of the host country’s laws. Not only that, it includes language about a possible charge for the service in the future. This makes little sense in this day of free storage services online, but it does Microsoft’s M.O.
What disturbed me most is the fact that you are essentially signing the rights to your files away by using the service, as revealed here:
“By posting or otherwise providing your submission, you are granting to the public free permission to use, copy, distribute, display, publish and modify your submission, each in connection with the service.”
Why sign your rights away to Microsoft, when simply sending yourself an email via Google’s GMail stores your file and keeps the rights with you? Microsoft: still a company operating under antiquated proprietary practices without a clue what works best for the customer.
source
“By posting or otherwise providing your submission, you are granting to the public free permission to use, copy, distribute, display, publish and modify your submission, each in connection with the service.”
Can you provide a link for this so I can read the quote in context please? I checked the skydrive site but couldn’t find anything with this wording.
I can’t find that quote, either. Perhaps it has been removed since. I hope Microsoft release a client application in their Live Essentials Suite that integrates Windows with SkyDrive seamlessly. That would be tops.