Verecom Web Design Blog

With the booming Internet marketing and e-commerce, the web design is beginning to emphasise visual, interactive technology, and hence the RIA ( Rich Internet Applications ), the new web design techniques, become the hot topic. In order to grab this business opportunity, Microsoft has also launched a new generation of RIA product, Silverlight 3.0 and stressed that it would allow Internet users have a better interactive experience.

Compared to the traditional HTML web design technologies, RIA uses vector-style animation, multimedia and database integration, to make the website has computer desktop use patterns and functions, hence allows the integration of multi-media Web site content, and improve the visitors loyalty with more intuitive, more friendly, more interactive use experience. “Website interface and content design is from simple text-and image-based rendering and go to the era of RIA rapidly” said from Microsoft’s develop team.

RIA’s technology characteristics, not only suitable for applications in entertainment, leisure and marketing fields, but also recently used in general business applications, so there are more and more enterprises are beginning to use the RIA technologies to develop the various services. For example, the United States Continental Airlines, uses RIA technologies to develop a customer service and reservation system to process booking enquiry from 70000 customers every day, and significantly enhance the efficiency of booking and customer satisfaction.

As the bullish prospects on RIA technologies, Microsoft developed RIA design tools, Silverlight, two years ago. Now there are 400 million computers around the world have downloaded and installed Silverlight. Microsoft has also released the latest version of Silverlight 3.0, in addition to supporting HD 1080P high-definition video and off-line implementation; it also supports Windows 7 multi-touch features. Microsoft develop team believes that in the future, Internet-based media, financial institutions, as well as electronic billboards, will be the RIA’s main market.

Edited By Henry Lu

Through many negotiations, Microsoft and Yahoo announced a number of cooperation in the search engine market. Yahoo will use Microsoft technology for all its search engine assets, while it is also responsible for online ads sales for both side platform. From this 10 years co-operation, Microsoft can exclusively access to Yahoo search engine license, and Microsoft can also integrate yahoo technology with its own.

From Revenue-sharing agreement based on the two sides, Microsoft will pay Yahoo for the traffic generated by Yahoo Website; Yahoo is expected to increase 500 million U.S. dollars annual revenue and cash flow of 275 million U.S. dollars, while saving 200 million capital expenditure.

“The cooperation will benefit our clients and industry greatly” Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said in a statement. “I believe this cooperation laid the foundation for innovation and development of the Internet into a new era” Bartz said.

Microsoft and Yahoo have more than a year to discuss cooperation, at beginning Microsoft plan to buy Yahoo, and this request was refused by Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang. However Jerry Yang was been removed from the board of director and replaced by Bartz, hence triggered this negotiation for cooperation.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer also commended the cooperation between the two sides will benefit Microsoft’s new search engine www. Bing.com and great opportunity to challenge current top 1 search engine giant, Google.

“Through the cooperation with Yahoo, we will be able to develop more innovative search technology to benefit our advertisers, and also to provide more market choose for consumers beside Google.” Ballmer said.

“The success of search engine businesses needs innovations and users scale, our search platform www.Bing.com provides a breakthrough innovation. And the cooperation with yahoo will provide the scale we need for the rapid development on relevance and the availability”

Based on ComScore’s survey, Google currently holds the 65% of search engine market in US, Microsoft only has 8% and Yahoo has 20%.

Edited By Henry Lu

IT industry testing released the report says the growth rate of Microsoft search engine Bing.com already run ahead of rivals since his launch on May this year.

Microsoft new search engine provides many search services. According to data released by Hitwise showed that, the growth rate of Bing.com reached 25 percent in June. But however, its
U.S. market share is still only 5.25 percent.

This new search engine attracts the close attention of media. Microsoft plan to spend 100 million U.S. dollars to promote Bing.com, and intends to take the territory from Google, the current number one search engine company.

However, Google still remains the dominant position of the U.S. market with 74 percent market share. Yahoo still has the second largest market share of 16%. Ask.com has fourth place with 3.2 percent market share.

Analysts said that, the growth rate of Bing.com is faster than the other three well-known search engine companies. And Microsoft hopes Bing.com can grab more market for online ads.

On Thursday’s stock trading, Microsoft shares fell to 22.44 U.S. dollars. And Google rose 2% to 410.39 U.S. dollars.

Edited By Henry Lu

CIO Insight- The well known IT magazine in US, Selected 10 best software companies of year 2008 according to its company value, product reliability and product loyalty.

In 2008, the rank of many traditional software companies dropped, from the recent statistics, Google is the number 1 software company in 2008 and its competitor, Microsoft, fall to Number 7.
Following are the list of these 10 companies from CIO Insight:

Number 1: Google- Overall Score: 81
Company value: 82
Product reliability: 79
Product loyalty: 83
Google continued innovation and strong moves in the mobility space succeeded in knocking Red Hat out of the top spot.

Number 2: Red Hat– Overall Score: 79
Company value: 75
Product reliability: 75
Product loyalty: 92
Last year overall winner remains strong, its ratings this year, with the responsiveness to needs of customers engendering high loyalty levels.

Number 3: Citrix– Overall Score: 73
Company value: 73
Product reliability: 73
Product loyalty: 89
Citrix held steady at No. 3 just edging out Adobe, but failed to rank in the top two, as it did in 2006 and 2005.

Number 4: Adobe- Overall Score: 72
Company value: 72
Product reliability: 73
Product loyalty: 93
Adobe just missed moving into the top three, but took home the highest loyalty rankings of any software vendor (besides Google).

Number 5: Novell- Overall Score: 65
Company value: 63
Product reliability: 67
Product loyalty: 72
Novell raised four spots from last year but low customer loyalty scores bogged the firm down in this year rankings.

Number 6: Salesforce- Overall Score: 62
Company value: 62
Product reliability: 62
Product loyalty: 86
A new entry to the list, the Software-as-a-Service forerunner showed average performance in value and reliability but got a big boost from strong customer loyalty.

Number 7: Microsoft- Overall Score: 61
Company value: 61
Product reliability: 61
Product loyalty: 83
The same goes for the software behemoth- solid customer loyalty helped keep it hovering around the same spot as last year and fended off others.

Number 8: Cognos- Overall Score: 60
Company value: 60
Product reliability: 60
Product loyalty: 78
The business intelligence vendor leapt four spots to regain its 2005 footing, but it still faces an uphill climb to reach the highest tier of software providers.

Number 9: Business Object (SAP)- Overall Score: 59
Company value: 61
Product reliability: 57
Product loyalty: 82
Business Objects has steadily slipped from its 2005 perch as No. 3 in the software market but just missed eclipsing rival Cognos this year.

Number 10: Oracle- Overall Score: 57
Company value: 56
Product reliability: 59
Product loyalty: 80
Larry Ellison’s acquisition machine kept humming this year, but a poor showing in value just barely kept Oracle in the Top 10.

Edited By Henry Lu

According to the statistics report from January this year, the market share of Window dropped about 2%, and Linux increased 0.2%, however, the market share of Apple Mac increased by 1.3%, together with 0.2% increasing on its iPhone product.

The report form marketing searching company, Net Application, says it is the first time the market share of Window dropped below 90%. On November this year, its market share is 89.62%. The Linux is not the main cause for this, the rapid growing of Apple Mac and iPhone is the Window’s main threat. The Statistics report from Net Application is done by the website’s visiting rate of Operation system, which includes the mobile phone, game console and any device with the OS and can go online. The market share of Microsoft Windows was always above 90% before November this year, and is even above 95% during year 2004/2005. But this year Microsoft loses its share slowly.

Microsoft’s marketing manager admitted that in many countries, Apple Mac is becoming more popular and hence its market share increased rapidly. In Japan and US, Mac becomes quite accepted for many computer users, Unlike Australia, where Window is still the mainstream for people. And many Australia Mac users are the certain professional type people like graphic designer and editor which are quite small group compare with Window’s.

Edited By Henry Lu

With 10 million dollars, Microsoft hired Famous Comedy star, Jerry Seinfeld, teamed with Bill Gates to Promoted two global ads on September. Later on, against previous ads from Apple, Microsoft released its I am PC series as a strike-back.

Marketing Company Crispin Porter + Bogusky, run this advertising Campaign. In first series ads, Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates play as two people shopping for shoes and home stay with a family but never mentioned a word to Window or Vista. Later on the second series of ads, “I am PC” as the reply for Apple’s “I am Mac” campaign, focus on the PC users and try to change their negative impression toward PC and deliver the message “I use PC, and I am fun”.

Bill Gates / Jerry Seinfeld  Series 1

Series 2 — Click here

I am PC Series 1

I am PC Series 2 and 3

Can these Advertising Campaign change the Microsoft’s image?

From the view point of experts, these Campaign are not successful viral marketing, because their topics are not related to the Window products, and however, they focus too much on this Comedy Star. And most people have difficulty to understand this commercial. For the “I am PC” series, Microsoft tried to promote its already number 1 window Operation System, which made people feel funny and say: “Microsoft is afraid of Apple too much” The experts from IT industry said, Microsoft should produce adverting Campaign which focus more on their products, or try to focus current bugs of apple’s MobileMe and Iphone’, which are the apple’s weak points. This way may have better result. And Window developers should improve the Vista and design a better user-friendly Interface. A Good Advertising Campaign is not a cure for Vista.>

Apple takes a Jab at Microsoft Ads

Apple has come out with a clever retorts in response to Bill Gates / Jerry Seinfeld series.

This is one pokes fun at Microsoft for spending too much money at advertising instead of fixing window’s problems;

In the second one talk about that Microsoft not mentioning any of their product names in the adverts at all;

Edited By Henry Lu