Microsoft keeps consumer focus with purchase of Gears of War Xbox game and by renaming its cloud storage service “OneDrive.”

After announcing strong enterprise earnings last week, Microsoft made two announcements Monday that emphasized its ongoing ambitions to woo consumers: the official rebranding of SkyDrive, the company’s cloud storage service, as OneDrive; and the purchase of the preferred Gears of War game franchise.

Microsoft agreed to rebrand SkyDrive in July, after a British court ruled that Microsoft’s use of the name violated an indicator owned by the British Sky Broadcasting Group. Sky Broadcasting claims ownership of the usage of “Sky” as a prefix. Microsoft similarly changed the name of the Live Tile UI in Windows 8 from “Metro” to “Modern” following a lawsuit filed by the retail group Metro AG.

In a blog post, Microsoft GM for Consumers Apps and Services Ryan Gavin said the rebrand won’t affect services for current SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro customers. He also alluded to OneDrive’s place in outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer’s “One Microsoft” strategy.

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“You wish OneDrive for everything on your life,” he wrote, paraphrasing the language utilized in Microsoft’s current Windows market campaign, which emphasizes “one” user experience that unites content and services around the Xbox, Windows Phone, and Windows 8.1 tablets, and PCs.

To an extent, “One Microsoft” has emphasized the creation of an insular Windows ecosystem. That allows you to use Excel inside the same way on both a tablet and PC, you’re stuck with Windows. But other services and products are less restricted, particularly within the mobile space. You cannot natively run Excel on an iPad or an Android tablet, but SkyDrive/OneDrive apps were available for a while. Even a number of the newer Office apps, comparable to OneNote, are cross-platform.

This openness represents the way forward for “One Microsoft,” some degree Ballmer made when he confirmed the overall Office suite will eventually come to non-Windows platforms. Ballmer, who has faced criticism for concentrating on low-margin consumer products as opposed to lucrative enterprise services, has justified Microsoft’s consumer strategies as “high value” activities that reach throughout users’ lives, not just from devices within the lounge to devices within the office, but in addition across operating systems. Ballmer mentioned e-mail services equivalent to Outlook as one such activity, but others, akin to OneDrive and Skype, clearly tap into an analogous vein.

As “One Microsoft” becomes more open, it will possibly also diminish the appeal of the Windows platform — but when Ballmer was placing the best bets on his way out, that needn’t necessarily be the case. With its current strategy, Microsoft is responding to BYOD and consumerization by recognizing that users desire to consume services on different devices from different manufacturers. But it is also hoping it might make its own OS and devices more attractive by optimizing them for important services.

OneDrive is obtainable on many platforms, as an example, but only Windows devices have the service baked into the file structure. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the tactic hasn’t yet paid off.

In other news central to Microsoft’s consumer goals, the corporate acquired the rights to the Gears of War series from Epic Games. Rod Fergusson, who played a leadership role at the franchise while at Epic, will join Microsoft to direct development of future Gears of War properties. In a blog post, Microsoft said gamers have bought greater than 22 million Gears of War titles, with grosses topping $1 billion.

Microsoft sold a robust 7.4 million Xbox consoles within the newest quarter, including 3.9 million of the hot Xbox One.

Michael Endler joined InformationWeek as an associate editor in 2012. He graduated from Stanford in 2005 and previously worked in talent representation, as a contract copywriter and photojournalist, and as a teacher.

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