Murdoch machinations mean Microsoft must rename SkyDrive Microsoft is going to have to rename its SkyDrive cloud storage service after agreeing to submit to a British court's ruling over ownership of the brand name. British Sky Broadcasting Group, the European satellite broadcasting arm of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, took on Redmond over the rights to the SkyDrive name, pointing …
This post has been deleted by its author
They don't but because BSkyB offer telecommunication products and services that put them in the same category as cloud products its enough for people to believe that SkyDrive is a BSkyB product.
In fairness to Microsoft BSkyB and Sky TV as a trademark is barely heard of outside the UK, Sky's Internet offering's even less so and after the Edge fiasco it seemed trademark's based on a common word weren't really enforceable.
"Sky TV as a trademark is barely heard of outside the UK"
How long is it since you were last in Germany? have a look at www.sky.de anyway.
I believe Italy has a bit of Murdoch too. You'd have thought Berlusconi might have put them off, but apparently not. You could try www.sky.it
Maybe others too; someone's annual report would cover it, but I'm too lazy to work out which piece of the empire would have the details (it doesn't seem to be in the BSkyB report, but that's no big surprise).
"Anyway anyone uses microsoft products (and isn't' some whack job fundamentalist) and has skydrive know it shits on the shit you get from other vendors."
Can you explain for people who aren't tied into the Microsoft treadmill, what the advantages of Skydrive are over every other online storage locker out there?
(Also yay to Reg comments for inserting random newlines everywhere. This paragraph inserted solely to prevent it.)
Can you explain for people who aren't tied into the Microsoft treadmill, what the advantages of Skydrive are over every other online storage locker out there?
I haven't investigated in depth but there's some reasonable integration with the Office products and there's no undesirable chatter from the client like there is with DropBox.
I wouldn't say it was notably superior from what I have seen so far but it's not obviously deficient.
SeeDrive
I think that would be good - See because it sounds like C:\ and cannot be seen - a complete oxymoron that will baffle users in the way only MS can! They could even bring back good old Abort, Fail, Retry for when it goes tits up and set the website background colour to a nice deep blue when the servers go down!
At least there's an opportunity to fix the SkyDrive + SkyDrivePro (SharePoint) confusion which only gets worse with 2012 R2 "Work Folders", which probably should have been SkyDrivePro?
Guess they'll go with "Live Drive" assuming they're not planning to rename Windows Live now that chunks of it are Office 365 (Outlook)? Though I'd prefer they call it something obvious!
This post has been deleted by its author
I'm a little disappointed that Sky won the ruling. Companies that trademark names that already mean something should have to accept the consequences (namely a lesser degree of protection from similar forms to the trademark). I seem to recall the Rosetta Stone company having a spat with Google a while back over naming confusion as well.
Drive! (too bad that Yahoo! deal didn't take off)
iDrive (see what Apple does with that one)
My Drive (right before My Music and My Pictures)
YDrive? (why, indeed?)
UDrive (your turn)
SexDrive (never can have too much capacity...)
Ndrive (oops... trouble from Nvidia)
Rdrive (as in yours, mine, and the NSA's)
MurDrive (take that, Rupert...!)
DriveL (for all those cat videos)
Clouds are made of vapour aren't they? Oh I'm sorry, that should read Vapor Drive. My apologies.
Hmm, there's a big temptation to stick your data into a place that looks very, how shall we say?
Sexy.
But in doing so you may pick up some kind of infection from other people who've been doing the same thing. It is highly likely that you will not realize it immediately either.
How embarrassing to have to go to a professional and admit what you've been up to.
Does this mean that I will no longer be able to look up at the <you know what> and say "Oh, the <you know what> is falling? and rather than reference cloud storage will I have to say "Oh look at the <white fluffy / dark grey thing> in the <you know what>", 'cause the version of the <white fluffy / dark grey thing> used for online storage might not appreciate being referenced as located in the <you know what>.
I wonder if they could get another large corporate to pipe up about possible brand confusion, and thus disprove the case that enough people confused it with BSkyB, because sufficiently large numbers of people were confusing it with the other company, hence cancelling out the whole sorry issue?
Continuing the "big drive in the sky" theme as the name SkyDrive did was poor marketing, product positioning, statementing, however you want to call it. The big drive shared over the network isn't what the lately renamed SkyDrive service is about at all. That is what Novell offered 20 years ago and what DropBox, eBox, Box and all the other sky drive offerings are about.
SkyDrive isn't about storage; it's about functionality; about doing stuff either self-collaboratively (sharing stuff around your own devices) or true collaboration; building resources with co-workers and other principals. The sort of thing that Google+ with Google Docs etc was trying to get going and the sort of solution that cloud services like Kahootz and Podio provide with their rich "can do" out of the box tool set.
As an aside I don't believe anybody in a commercial environment could ever seriously consider using DropBox where anybody with access to a folder can delete anything in that folder. That way lies only despair - and constant undoing.
I would call it Clusterz and leave others to find a place for the missing "fuc"
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
