Microsoft's New OneDrive Branding in Jeopardy

Well, that didn't take long.

Neowin is reporting today that they have had conversations with Thomas Medard Frederiksen, the CEO of One.com, about Microsoft's rebranding of SkyDrive to OneDrive. Microsoft relinquished the SkyDrive name due to a settlement with the British Sky Broadcasting Group over the use of the word "Sky," and it now looks like they may now have trouble with OneDrive, despite a pretty serious effort to promote the new name already. The BSkyB was a silly dispute, but One.com may have even more to stand behind since it offers its own cloud service that allows customers to synchronize files with the Cloud – very similar to what Microsoft offers.

Frederiksen also told Neowin that he was surprised Microsoft didn't perform better due diligence in researching the name before releasing it to the public, and that, for his company, it is important to protect their brand name.

Does this mean One.com will sue Microsoft? It'll be interesting to watch.

At its core, One.com is a web hosting company based in Denmark and it serves more than 1,000,000 customers in 149 countries. So, it's not a small company. One of their additional services, Cloud Drive, provides exactly what Microsoft intends to offer with OneDrive. Cloud Drive installs on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android and provides constant data backup and sync, makes files available for access anywhere, and includes file sharing features. Again, exactly like is proposed with OneDrive.

After Microsoft's announcement of the rebranding, many took to social media and blogs to praise the new name. People like it. And, for good reason – it's already taken. OneDrive is/was a perfect nomenclature, aligning directly with Microsoft's new "Microsoft One" company march.

Wither a name.