Microsoft SkyDrive is Now OneDrive

SkyDrive has now officially been renamed to OneDrive by Microsoft, after a UK judge forced Redmond’s hand due to a naming issue brought to the attention of a court by British Sky Broadcasting.

Now, if you head over to www.skydrive.com, you’ll find that the service is now officially called OneDrive, complete with a revamped homepage, login fields, and more.

Why Microsoft had to change SkyDrive’s name to OneDrive, here’s the reply according to Sky, a major broadcaster and provider of satellite and broadband Internet service in the UK, 17 of its customers reached out to the company, mistaking it for the same firm that operated Microsoft’s cloud service. Of course, that wasn’t the case, so a UK court ruled that Microsoft had to change the name of SkyDrive.

Sky, you see, names all of its product offerings with the word “sky” at the front: Sky Entertainment, Sky Broadband, Sky Wi-Fi, etc. The judge noted that because Sky and Microsoft’s SkyDrive service shared commonality with respect to naming, ”there was a likelihood of confusion in the average consumer.” The judge also ruled that Microsoft would be granted a “reasonable” amount of time to rename SkyDrive to something else

While that may take some getting used to, the change also gives Microsoft an opportunity to introduce a few new features. Namely, storage space referrals and automatic photo backups.

For Android users, you now get automatic photo backups if you wish—something that was available for Windows Phone, Windows 8, and iPhone previously. On any platform now, if you configure that automatic backup of photos, you’ll get 3GB more of storage space (over the default of 7GB free). For everyone, Microsoft is also introducing ways to earn more storage space by referring friends to the new OneDrive, at 500MB per referral, and you can get additional storage via monthly plans now too.

Video sharing and transcoding are supposedly easier now too, but the main things—besides the name change—are the mobile photo backups and ability to pimp OneDrive to get more space for yourself.

“Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to get all of your favorite stuff in one place – one place that is accessible via all of the devices you use every day, at home and at work. Because let’s face it, until now, cloud storage services have been pretty hard to use, and the vast majority of us still have our stuff spread out everywhere. In fact, according to a recent poll, at least 77 percent of people who are familiar with the cloud still have content stored on a device that is not backed up elsewhere. We want to change that,” said Chris Jones via an official blog post.

It has also renamed SkyDrive Pro, the corporate-grade online storage service tied to Office 365, as OneDrive for Business. Microsoft said it would reveal more about OneDrive for Business at the SharePoint Conference slated to run March 3-6 in Las Vegas.