SkyDrive is dead, long live OneDrive. In January, Microsoft announced that it would rebrand its storage service to OneDrive following a trademark dispute with British pay-TV provider BSkyB. Starting today, the website, the mobile apps and the desktop apps all share the same OneDrive name.
That’s not all. Microsoft is also launching today a new referral program. It is very reminiscent of Dropbox’s referral system. If a friend signs up using your link, you get 500MB of free storage, up to a maximum of 10 friends or 5GB. Similarly, if you enable automatic photo upload on your Windows, iOS or Android phone, you can get up to 3GB of free storage.
Overall, OneDrive users can get up to 8GB of additional storage. Before today, the Android app didn’t have the photo backup feature. But today’s update brought this feature to Android phones as well.
Consumer cloud storage is becoming cheaper as many tech giants now have their own services. Google has Google Drive, Apple has iCloud, Microsoft has OneDrive, etc. They will now have to differentiate from each other with better apps, better features and probably marketing.
Funnily, the two platforms that didn’t receive an update today were Microsoft’s two core products — Office 2013 and Windows 8.1. You will still see the old SkyDrive name, but everything will still work.
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