Last week, I was holidaying in my home place – Mumbai and we went out shopping for my marriage which is due on 23rd November, 2009. We were shopping at Bandra which is considered as a very posh place & there we can across a small chat [???] outlet. With the scare of swine flu, customers normally avoid from going to such places and this is where it becomes important for the shop owners to win back the customers confidence.

But what if, we use a household name to brand our small product. This is what MIGHT make the customer to purchase & use the product. And the chat outlet did exactly the same. The brand which was used was none other than Google and the product – Gola [????] was named Gogola, some interesting pictures below:

Considering that Internet explorer is the most widely used browser in India, using it effectively would be considered as “Another feather in their cap”. Just like the glass, the menu card was also shown in a very geeky manner in an IE window [picture below]:

I had a chat with the shop owner and he told that “They came out with this strategy mainly to get customer’s confidence” and as Google & Microsoft are household names[no matter you use them or not, but you definitely know them] using them ignites a spark in the customer’s mind. This trust indirectly builds the Gogola brand.

This is a lesson from a small time shop owner on “How a product can become a brand, sometimes by smartly re-modeling an existing brand“.

After Google announced the arrival of it’s open source Chrome OS, things are looking quite bright for the open source community. Though Chrome OS would be an excellent competitor not only for existing Linux distributions but also for the upcoming Windows 7, there are many reasons why Microsoft may not worry about the Chrome OS

However, it seems Microsoft is also trying to extend more support to the open source community. Recently, Microsoft released 20,000 lines of Linux code [LOC] to the Kernel community.Below are some of the highlights of the Microsoft release[received via an email from Microsoft's PR group]

• Microsoft has released 20,000 lines of Linux code to the Linux kernel community. The code, which includes three Linux device drivers will be available to the Linux Community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008.
• In addition to this significant code contribution, Microsoft is also highlighting the ongoing investment the company is making to optimize PHP on Windows Server and the Microsoft SQL Server database system. For additional context regarding Microsoft’s ongoing work with PHP and the Microsoft SQL Server driver for PHP available to support more native features in Microsoft SQL Server 2008, please see the IDC white paper–Microsoft, PHP & Open Source, a Pragmatic Alliance for more information.
• These milestones and the motivation behind the work is simple – Microsoft is committed to ensuring interoperability between the Microsoft technology and open source technology to provide the choices our customers are asking for.

Though 20,000 LOC is not a very huge number [considering Microsoft's size], it is good to see Microsoft embracing the open source technology You can read more about it here

This one is for all the guys who HATE Microsoft to the core There is an article – “Why I hate Microsoft”, the complete story of (not so innovative) Microsoft !!!

From the pages that I have read so far in the (lengthy) story, I liked the following:

This could have been one of the best interviews of all time,two rivals-Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on the same stage for an interview The start of the interview could not have been better where Bill Gates confirmed that he is not Fake Steve Jobs Below is a video of one of the interviews conducted by AllThingsD

The best part of the entire interview is the set of lines(below) from Steve Jobs, which really shows the fighting spirit of this great personality

And, you know, one of the things I did when I got back to Apple 10 years ago was I gave the museum to Stanford and all the papers and all the old machines and kind of cleared out the cobwebs and said, let’s stop looking backwards here. It’s all about what happens tomorrow. Because you can’t look back and say, well, gosh, you know, I wish I hadn’t have gotten fired, I wish I was there, I wish this, I wish that. It doesn’t matter. And so let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.

You can read the complete (long yet interesting) interview here where both show the sweet rivalry,in a true business sense!!!

Among the blogger community , Steve Jobs definitely scores more over Bill Gates!!!There is an article by Arpit Jacob , where he questions “Who is a better person Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?“ My vote was in Bill Gates’s favour taking the excellent work done by the “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation” into consideration.

I hope you enjoyed the interview,just as I did Also, do cast your votes as to “Who do you think is a better person-Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?”