Microsoft’s chief marketing officer Chris Capossela explained in a recent podcast that the OneDrive saga that reduced users’ free storage from 15 GB to 5 GB and which eliminates the unlimited storage place is his company’s own mistake after making a poor decision a year before.

Capossela said in the Windows Weekly podcast that offering unlimited storage wasn’t “economically sustainable,” pointing out that while the decision seemed very good at first, everything changed with the release of Windows 10.

Basically, OneDrive users previously uploaded files in the cloud at a regular rate, but once Windows 10 came out with deep integration of the service, everyone starting using it at an accelerated pace.

“We made the wrong decision”

So the unlimited storage option that was offered to Office 365 customers and the free 15 GB available to consumers were being used at their maximum capacity, and Microsoft had no other choice but to revert the decision it made 12 months before.

“OneDrive takeback is a way to anger a bunch of diehard fans, particularly in the way we did it. In that case, if anyone had seen the math, I don’t think they would have questioned the economics,” Capossela explained.

“The economic decision was easy. We made the economic decision, incorrectly, a year earlier, and then when we saw the usage just take off and you have 400 million or whatever it is, and you’re upgrading a gazillion Windows 10 machines, and they’re all using OneDrive, which is great, but you’ve got to use it in a way that’s economically sustainable. Those were some of the things that went into it.”

Microsoft has since changed its decision again, and is allowing users with 15 GB of storage space to avoid the cut by clicking a special link. The unlimited storage plan, however, won’t be coming back, and Microsoft says that it has no plan to re-introduce it anytime soon.