Friday, April 07, 2006

MSN Search Restored After 4 Hours Outage

Silicon Valley reported that Microsoft’s MSN search engine stopped working for about four hours Thursday. Microsoft spokesman Justin Osmer said in an e-mail that the company was still trying to determine what went wrong.

During the outage, which began about 8:30 am and was being restored as of about 12:15 pm, users who tried to find Web pages were told the service was unavailable.

Microsoft’s MSN Search is the No. 3 search provider in the United States, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, behind market leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. Nielsen/NetRatings said MSN provided 10.7 percent of all U.S. search results in February, compared with 48.5 percent for Google and 22.5 percent for Yahoo.

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Microsoft Gives Apache A Shock

Microsoft IIS gains 4.7% web server market while Apache loses 5.9% to 62.72, according to the latest web server survey by NetCraft. The move is driven by changes at GoDaddy.com, which has just migrated more than 3.5 million hostnames from Linux to Windows and also make GoDaddy becomes the world's largest Windows Server 2003 host.

Warren Adelman, president and COO of GoDaddy.com said that Microsoft provides an efficient and scalable operating platform as well as significant improvement of performance that needed to handle extraordinary growth.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Honda Japan Will Add Google Earth to Cars

Honda will soon add Google Earth to its ‘internavi Premium Club’ navigation service in Japan. The navigation service will interface Google Earth with high quality resolution satellite images of cities. The information will be transmitted to the cars via wireless connection that is integrated with the navigation service. However, Honda still has no plan to market the technology in the U.S.

Volkswagen also recently showed off by partnering with NVIDIA to bring Google Maps to car navigation systems. The company promised the technology would make it to showrooms very soon.

Source: Engadget

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Do Consumers Trust Microsoft Brand?

According to Forrester Research's 2005 Technology Brand Scorecard, Microsoft brand was only ranked 20th out of 22 consumer electronics and computer makers. The research represented 4,732 U.S. households and conducted during September and October 2005. The research included companies like Apple Computer, Sony, Intel, Nintendo and Panasonic.

The study found that Microsoft, Sony, Panasonic and Hewlett-Packard were brands that have highest adoption from consumers. However, when it comes to brand that consumers trust, only HP cracked the top five alongside with Dell and Apple Computer.

Source

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Sunday, April 02, 2006

"Hall of Shame" 2006 Admits Top American Brands

An independent branding consultant has released an annual branding "Hall of Shame". Surprisingly, several big-name brands are among the list. According to branding expert, Robert Passikoff, the companies who had branding bloopers are those that have been struggling to grow profits. The companies that committed a marketing blooper are Wal-Mart, Ford, Gap and Microsoft.

Ford the automaker made a tremendous marketing blunder by pulling ads from magazine that caters gay community because of pressure from Christian group. Moreover, decision to put the ads back made it even worst as it would have a big negative impact on its potential customer, both from the gay community and the Christian group.

Microsoft the largest software company is even terrible by calling its own customers "dinosaur heads". Even though the idea behind is to tell its customers to upgrade so they will not miss new features and benefits, however it is silly and doesn't work.

Wal-Mart the giant retailer was featuring singer Beyonce which is a big mistake as Wal-Mart's core customers are not upscale consumers. Wal-Mart's always been about low prices and the company should refocus on which they once were to the customer.

On the other hand, some brands like Motorola, American Express and Office supplies chain Staples get a thumbs-up. According to Kelly O'Keefe, CEO of O'Keefe Brands, those companies are doing a great job by changing the look and feel of the brand, maintaining long-term consistency of the image and being innovative.

Source: CNN Money