

Microsoft SkyDrive is now OneDrive - naren87
https://preview.onedrive.com/

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lmg643
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.

~~~
frogpelt
Reminds of this somewhat dated video:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvh5k1RWER4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvh5k1RWER4)

~~~
lmg643
that's exactly what i was thinking about - thanks for the post.

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Spearchucker
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?!?

~~~
csmithuk
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.

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

~~~
Pxtl
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.

~~~
bruceboughton

      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.

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jcurbo
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.

~~~
chiph
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.

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theg2
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.

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

~~~
theg2
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.

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

~~~
outside1234
We'd know by now with XBox One.

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joenathan
Microsoft OneNote has been around for over 10 years.

~~~
Pxtl
OneNote isn't a cloud storage system.

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

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freditup
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.

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skywhopper
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!

~~~
tunap
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.

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

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

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Pxtl
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?

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captn3m0
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.

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

[http://windows.microsoft.com/en-
us/skydrive/download](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/download)

~~~
captn3m0
Yeah, you're right. This is why Skydrive will be a major player, but as a
Linux user, its just not for me :(

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JeremyMorgan
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.

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

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Yuioup
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.

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gary4gar
UbunutuOne & OneDrive are quite similar names which might cause confusion for
microsoft

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alexevade
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....

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

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

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jeremysmyth
And then two.

Then three.

Then three point one one.

Then ninety-five.

Then ninety-eight.

Then two thousand.

Perfect numerical naming convention!

~~~
PeterWhittaker
Not unlike OSX, then?

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

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PeterWhittaker
Yes, that was precisely my point.

We are at version 9.1 of version 10.

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

Chrome will be into the triple digits soon.

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agumonkey
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>

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spants
OneDrive blog needs a better database! Currently down.

~~~
riddlemethat
They should have hosted with Amazon instead of Azure.

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positivelogic
Rut roh ... ̶S̶k̶y̶p̶e̶ Onepe

