SkyDrive is about to get a name change: could it be NewDrive?

This September, rather than face an uphill court battle with Britain’s BSkyB, Microsoft relented and agreed to change the name of its up and coming cloud storage services known as SkyDrive. If you’ve been following LiveSide over the past 7 years, you know that the first rumors of a (or a number of different) cloud storage service from Microsoft surfaced way back in 2006, when we first mentioned the name SkyDrive. To follow up on the history lesson, Microsoft unveiled a beta of the service in early 2007, and in August of that year it was officially renamed from “Windows Live Folders” to “SkyDrive”.

Fast forward to today, where some appearances of what might be a placeholder name are popping up. Paul Thurrott has noticed some occurrences of “NewDrive”, and indeed, www.newdrive.com resolves to SkyDrive.live.com, the home of SkyDrive.

 

We think “placeholder” is an important disclaimer, however, as if you remember back to the renaming from Hotmail to Outlook.com, we showed you internal-facing screenshots showing the placeholder “NewMail”.

Microsoft agreed to change the offending name in a “reasonable” period of time, and we’re certainly getting closer that deadline, so we are expecting a new name soon.  As to what the name might really be, we’re still betting on what has to be the favorite down the stretch, “Microsoft Drive”. We would also put “NewDrive” far back in the pack, but you never know.

What do you think SkyDrive will be called (and when), and will it keep the cloud icon, or go with a new brand entirely?