Microsoft Under Scrutiny Over New OneDrive Name

If you’re Microsoft and you’ve just come off a painful, losing court battle that has resulted in a total branding and marketing change for one of your most advertised products, I would assume that the last thing you’ll want to do is pick a new, potentially infringing name that could land you right back in court. Bizarrely, it seems as though that’s exactly what’s just happened with Microsoft’s SkyDrive debacle. After losing a court battle with UK provider BSkyB, Microsoft is changing the name of their popular cloud storage service to OneDrive. Unfortunately, it would seem as though Microsoft’s lawyers didn’t do their homework, as Microsoft is now under scrutiny for infringing on cloud storage competitor One.com, who operates a very similar cloud storage service under the name Cloud Drive.

Cloud Drive has been the jewel in One.com’s crown for the past three years, and company COO Thomas Medard Frederiksen isn’t too pleased with Microsoft’s decision to name their service after One.com’s own. “OneDrive, from Microsoft, is a similar product with a similar name, that will lead to confusion,” Mr. Frederiksen told popular Microsoft enthusiast blog Neowin today.

One.com isn’t taking that potential for confusion lightly, according to Frederiksen, the company has reached out to industry “trademark experts” to look at their options. With such a similar name, Microsoft OneDrive vs. One.com Cloud Drive – I don’t exactly blame the small start up for being fearful of Microsoft’s name change. Whether or not we’ll see this escalate quite as far as BSkyB’s case did over the last year has yet to be determined as no official lawsuit or formal complaint has been filed as of yet, however this could get really interesting, really fast.