14 DAY TRIAL // In an obvious deal between Microsoft and Seagate, the HDD giant wants to associate itself with cloud storage in a strong PR and as well branding move.
By buying a Backup Plus storage drive from Seagate, you'll be entitled to 200GB cloud storage space on Microsoft's Onedrive. A bold move, if not entirely illogical as Seagate actually owns a cloud storage service itself.
Named Wuala, Seagate bought its owner, LaCie, a Franco-American merger, in March 2012 for $186 million. Wuala went through troubled times in the end of 2011 before being bought by Seagate. Hosting storage space online before Seagate bought the company, it resorted to offer almost all of its premium services for free, like backup, sync, file versioning and time travel.
Hitting a financial low at the end of 2012, the company was finally bought by Seagate and two years later to save costs switched to a paid-only service in June 2014, and a few months afterwards prompted all previous free-only customers to either migrate or purchase a paid plan.
Although LaCie, Wuala's parent company, sells storage devices too, it is the only company that associates itself with Wuala, including cloud storage bundle offers when buying a LaCie storage drive.
Missing an in-house opportunity
By moving onwards with Microsoft, Seagate might miss growing the branding potential of Wuala and instead of promoting a niche online storage service, it goes onwards with an already large and widely used cloud service in hopes of better industry positioning alongside Microsoft.
Even the practicality of this decision is questionable as most Backup Plus drives come with storage areas ranging from 500GB to 2TB, dwarfing the available space on Onedrive.
The eligible Seagate models for this offer from Onedrive are Seagate Backup Plus Slim, Seagate Backup Plus Desktop, including a future Seagate Backup Plus that will come with 4TB this summer.