We reported back in July that Microsoft had settled with UK’s BSkyB which had sued it for infringing on its “Sky” brand by calling its cloud storage service SkyDrive. Microsoft has spent considerable resources in building up the SkyDrive brand in the particularly competitive cloud storage niche, however since it opted to settle the lawsuit, it meant that the company will have to rename SkyDrive. BSkyB had agreed to let Microsoft use the brand for a “reasonable” time so that the transition could be made easily. If latest reports are to be believed, Microsoft might be close to picking out a new name. SkyDrive might be renamed to “NewDrive,” according to a connected Windows blogger named Paul Thurrott.
A website called LiveSide recently reported that the www.newdrive.com URL has already been picked up and that it was redirecting visitors to SkyDrive, however as of this writing, the link appears to be dead. For all we know though, NewDrive could only be a placeholder until Microsoft stumbles upon a brand that it feels is right for its cloud storage service. The company has used this tactic before, its email service Hotmail was codenamed Newmail internally before it was rebranded to what we now know as Outlook.com.