This week saw a lot of gears change in the field of Information Technology. It is curious how the marketing gurus played out their roles in order to create the ripple.
The biggest news was the takeover of Nokia’s phone business by Microsoft. The latter shelled out $7.2 billion to be able to control the phone’s hardware on which their Windows Phone operating system runs.
The first Nokia phones to run a Windows Phone operating system came out in October 2011. Since then the Nokia-Windows partnership has been consistently underperforming in the market. The Samsung-Google partnership, which sells Android phones, has been the clear winner until now. Yet, Microsoft’s strategic acquisition of Nokia’s phone business means Microsoft is going to continue fighting in the smartphone market.
Owning Nokia’s phone business will mean Microsoft also owns a heap of patents that Nokia had gathered throughout the years. Not only did Microsoft gain intellectual property, but it will also hold greater control over its phone. When a company owns the hardware and the software, it can tweak and twist everything, resulting in the best user experience and performance.
Integrating Windows Phone operating system tightly with the hardware will allow Microsoft to do what Apple has done. Apple is similar in that it makes both the hardware for its devices and the software that runs on top of it. That marriage is what makes iOS and its cousins drool-worthy. Somewhere up there, Steve Jobs is cursing Microsoft again for copying what he did (in 1988, Apple sued Microsoft because Windows copied the Macintosh’s graphical user interface elements).
Yahoo! also earned press recently. Marissa Mayer is the current Chief Executive Officer of Yahoo! Under her new regime, the search giant went on an acquisition spree. With stocks up by 75 percent since the time she took over, former employees returning and the company investing in recovering a depleted research division, there is hope for Yahoo!
Yahoo! also sprung a surprise with its new logo. Calligraphers will notice the tilted exclamation point and curving lines. Mayer, with a team of designers, came up with the new logo this summer. Yahoo! is definitely seeing changes. Whether its new strategy to attack personalized information market will succeed or not is yet to be seen.
And finally, Google has also had its share of the marketing gossip. It came up with another fun name for the latest 4.4 version of its mobile operation system, Android. They named it KitKat after the confectionery product. Android versions have always been named after sweets, from Cupcake (Android 1.5) to Donut (Android 1.6) to the most recent predecessor of KitKat, Jelly Bean (Android 4.1).
The search giant has always come up with innovative marketing gimmicks. From Google Doodle to Google Glass, the company has always stressed thinking outside the box. Google recently came up with a cool idea of having air balloons high in the stratosphere act as relays for wireless communication. Ideas and innovations like these have made Google the magnet for talent.
More often than not, the marketing of such giants is inexplicably catchy. Google came up with a website for KitKat and modified it to become a classic pun so that one cannot tell whether the website is referring to the candy or the operating system.
As these giants play among themselves, they are pushing boundaries. Technology pervades. It is altering our lives.
