Microsoft SkyDrive is now OneDrive | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft SkyDrive is now OneDrive

preview.onedrive.com

38 pointsnaren8755 comments

Microsoft seems to be making progress in unwinding the habit of convoluted naming schemes. I would love to hear a testimonial from a Microsoft marketing insider as to where the naming trend came from, and how they view it internally.

My most recent encounter was looking into the product currently known as "Microsoft Blend for Visual Studio 2012", previously known as "Microsoft Expression Blend for Visual Studio". I learn from Wikipedia that the article was originally code-named "Sparkle" - it's funny to me because the code name is the name Apple would have launched with, whereas at Microsoft, it's not "customer ready" until they've given it a suitably unwieldy name.

No, it was previously known only as "Microsoft Expression Blend", no Visual Studio. The new name reflects that you can no longer get it standalone, you must get it as part of VS2012/2013.

Reminds of this somewhat dated video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvh5k1RWER4

that's exactly what i was thinking about - thanks for the post.

I guess I'm somewhat of an anomaly in that I really like the Microsoft ecosystem. I have a Windows Phone, a Surface Pro 2, an XBox One, and so on, all the way to Office and Visual Studio.

But, and I don't even know what a gorge is, as forgiving as being a fanboy makes me, sometimes Microsoft makes my gorge rise. I'm sure OneDrive will be nice. But WTF are they doing with Xbox Music on SkyDrive (and it seems OneDrive won't change it)?!?

Windows 8 crows about its ability to upload my music (that I paid for) to SkyDrive, allowing me to play it anywhere. Except on my fucking XBox One. Which insists I purchase an XBox Music Pass to play my own music.

WTF. Seriously, really, WTF-a-doodle-doo?!?

It wont sync with your windows phone either. And half the time ot wont play off SkyDrive.

Every ecosystem has a pain in the ass step somewhere either by design (Apple/iTunes) or questionable integration (windows live or whatever it is called now). It's frustrating. Android may be better but my only experience is with 2.3 which is ancient.

For music, I actually got pissed off with it to the point of buying a CD player.

Just so you know, Microsoft was forced to change the name after losing a trademark case in the UK.

Ugh. I'm going to guess Sky TV?

Lawyers ruin everything.

The dispute was with BSkyB.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/27/following-trademark-dispute...

Not surprising. BSkyB owns Sky TV.

Gmail, Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc. Lots of companies have survived branding issues in the UK without a complete end-to-end rename.

Microsoft's marketing department is just crazy. How many times did MSN Messenger get rebranded? Photo gallery? Their webmail thing?

It's crazy. When they have a major platform, they're rock solid on the name (like the Office Word/Excel/whatever) but they change icons and GUIs willy-nilly.

When they have a smaller, supporting platform, they get complete ADD on the name.

When they have a developer tool? They just give it an ungoogleable description that doesn't even count as a name. Their SQL Server is called SQL Server. Their common language runtime is called the common language runtime. Their MVC framework is called MVC.

Microsoft sucks at naming things. I think XBox is the last brand they created that they actually properly curated.

  Their SQL Server is called SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server. See also: Oracle Database, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite

  Their common language runtime is called the common language runtime.

.NET Common Language Runtime

  Their MVC framework is called MVC.

ASP.NET MVC.

They should have named it this anyway, it makes me immediately think of OneNote, which is an MS app that TONS of non-power/non-technical users know about. If you told someone you could put your notes in OneNote and it backs them up to OneDrive that would probably make a lot of sense to most people.

Good tie-in. While I liked the name SkyDrive a lot ("It's like a drive ... in the sky!"), this is pretty good too.

Microsoft is never one to leave well enough alone, so I look forward to OneOffice, OneStudio, and WindowsOne.

What a disaster of PR naming. The service is great but the constant rebranding is going to confuse customers. I guess ill see an app update on my Lumina soon too.

They were obligated to rename it after losing a case in the UK. Nothing to be done.

They've not had much luck recently on that front. Both Skydrive and Metro had to be re-branded.

I know the reasons, and it's sad that a compromise couldn't be reached. There's almost no one someone could confuse the two services. As someone else mentioned, it seems like Europe has it out for Microsoft just for kicks.

It'll be interesting to see how Canonical will respond, if they will respond. Their service is called 'Ubuntu One' or sometimes just 'One'.

We'd know by now with XBox One.

Well OneDrive and UbuntuOne are in exactly the same area (cloud hosting of stuff, integrated with an operating system) so it's a lot easier to sue imo (thank god ianal)

Microsoft OneNote has been around for over 10 years.

OneNote isn't a cloud storage system.

It actually is a cloud storage system for notes, but that doesn't matter, it establishes the naming convention.

What a loss for Microsoft - 'SkyDrive' definitely has more of an appeal than 'OneDrive', and it'll surely be confusing to some people to see the name changed. And it seems like a case they should have been able to win. Sometimes it seems as if all of Europe just loves to mess with Microsoft.

I'm surprised MS didn't pick "LiveDrive" to start with. Although I'm sure someone has that trademarked as well, although Microsoft has plenty of cash to buy trademarks. You'd think, though, that they would also have plenty of lawyers to check out and register trademarks before they settle on product names, too.

Perhaps they should mine their own archives and try some alternatives:

Drive.NET, Visual Drive, ActiveDrive, Drive2014, Drive/286, Drive for Workgroups, MS-DRIVE?

Or better still, we know they own MS-DOS so how about "Microsoft Disk (Off-Site)"? Genius!

LiveDrive wouldn't work b/c their hotmail/msn mail/live mail service has been re-branded yet again to confuse longstanding users of their cloud-free, unsocial mail client...

edit:condensed; removed OT color commentary.

Dear Microsoft. Renaming something does not make it better. It just confuses your customers.

they're legally required to rename it: http://gizmodo.com/microsoft-has-to-change-skydrives-name-be... (Edit: technically it didn't get quite that far. They're preemptively renaming to settle a lawsuit that they would lose. Regardless it remains hilarious how much trouble Microsoft has naming things. Even when they have good names like Skydrive, they turn out to be bad ones).

They had no choice - British Sky Broadcasting Group owns the trademark and forced the name change about 6 months ago.

Then do what Google did and keep using the brand name everywhere else except Britain. You have to do internationalization anyways. It's not like you call it the same thing in Swahili or Mandarin, why not just call it something different in British English and keep the established brand running everywhere else?

This renaming was triggered by a trademark issue - http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/27/5349830/microsoft-onedrive...

The one thing that is most important in a file-sync solution for me is cross-platform support. And very few players in the field handle this well (Android/Linux/iOS/Windows/Mac). I doubt MS is even thinking of going cross-platform for SkyDrive, so meh.

There is a SkyDrive/OneDrive client for all of those OSes except Linux.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/download

Yeah, you're right. This is why Skydrive will be a major player, but as a Linux user, its just not for me :(

I don't care what they call it, as long as they fix it.

It works great most of the time, but occasionally on my surface I get a message like "40k of disk space needed" to open a 40k document. And it simply won't open. Sometimes on my laptop it won't save.

And yes I have 45 gig of space on the device. Still using Google drive for most stuff.

Sounds like my win phone. 4.5Gb free and it wont install a 200Mb app because it is apparently "out of space". WTF.

Yeah except that it's not one drive.

I have SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro running on my desktop. SkyDrive Pro is the one that's supposed to be connected to my Office Online account. Yet when I try to save a new Office document the directory defaults to ... SkyDrive. There seems to be no way to change this behavior.

They should call it TwoDrive.

UbunutuOne & OneDrive are quite similar names which might cause confusion for microsoft

Interesting to see that they have gone for minimal Microsoft branding on the site and not on a .live.com sub-domain. I wonder if this will continue once launched....

I think they've deprecated the live.com brand, which makes it odd that Outlook.com still lives there.

Xbox One, OneDrive -- are we looking at Windows One next?

And then two.

Then three.

Then three point one one.

Then ninety-five.

Then ninety-eight.

Then two thousand.

Perfect numerical naming convention!

I like calculator numbering - the bigger the number, the lamer the calculator.

Not unlike OSX, then?

The "X" means 10. The previous version was MacOS 9.

Yeah, but we've now had 10 "minor" releases of OSX, over the span of 13 years. If they followed any sort of version conventions, we wouldn't be at 10.9 right now, we'd be at 19. Each of the point releases should have had a new major version bump.

Yes, that was precisely my point.

We are at version 9.1 of version 10.

I think it's better that way than Java or Chrome version numbers.

Chrome will be into the triple digits soon.

OneNote has been around for a while. It might have provided some of the inspiration?

Also, as mentioned Canonicals reaction might be interesting.

OneNote..

Semantically, sky wasn't the one needing to go. You don't save memory on the drive (unless they meant the bytes in the microcontroller), maybe on the magnetic disk and not necessarily.

</snark>

OneDrive blog needs a better database! Currently down.

They should have hosted with Amazon instead of Azure.

Rut roh ... ̶S̶k̶y̶p̶e̶ Onepe

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