The last 6 months have been extremely busy for me with many projects on my agenda; unfortunately the blog received the least priority and finding time to post new content has been difficult. On the bright side, I had noted down topics to come back and write on so hopefully in the coming months I will have some more time to write-up these articles and bring back the momentum again.
Back on topic; those that have watched the tech media of recent might have caught word on the re-branding announcement that Microsoft has made with its consumer cloud storage service. SkyDrive as the service is now known; will soon be re-branded as OneDrive in a recent settlement in the courts after a trademark legal battle with Sky Broadcasting Group in the UK (BSkyB).
The settlement was reached around August last year with reports of financial terms being made as part of the settlement with figures not disclosed. The settlement detail was kept quiet, probably because of the partnership that both companies have in that BSkyB rely on Microsoft technology to deliver services.
This brand change is the second time in the last 2 years that Microsoft have slipped up on their ability to research and check existing trademark conflicts before deciding on and publicising a brand that they call their own. Just before Windows 8 was released to manufacturing, Microsoft was forced to make an emergency name change to all documentation and product branding that referred to the new Start Screen codenamed “Metro UI” at that time. They had been previously threatened with legal action by a large European retailer in 2012 claiming breach of trademark; causing the codename “Metro UI” to become what is now called the “Modern UI”.
One would think that with the enormous teams of marketing and legal people Microsoft must employ, rookie mistakes like these would not happen. Just goes to show how even the more experienced operators out they can still slip up from time-to-time.
The consumer SkyDrive service will start to roll-out its branding changes as of this month with no defined timeline on completion. From what I read; it does seem like the settlement conditions provided ample time to transition over. The other note worth mentioning here is that the SkyDrive Pro offering through SharePoint 2013 on-premise and Office 365 will change to ‘OneDrive for Business’ as it receives the new branding updates. No timeline was told on this development, but one would guess this update will take much more time and effort than the consumer service counterpart.
Overall the time and money that will be spent to make these changes is still very significant as SkyDrive’s integration across the whole Microsoft product line-up is huge. Windows 8.1, Xbox, Windows Phone, Office just to name a few.