Google Revamps Homepage - In Japan

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Japan found out yesterday that their defaulted Google homepage looked like nothing they had ever seen before. The clean white background was tainted by
some tabs that weren’t there the previous night, but overall the feedback the team responsible for the change received was ranging from "good" to "hell yeah!," or at least that’s what it must have been, I can’t really read Japanese.

The post on the Official Google Japan blog, although translated here, is pretty much unreadable. Nevertheless, as you can see in the screenshot on the left, the additions blend in nicely with everything else, and all the services that have been included in the tabs are a whole lot easier to access than in the traditional manner.

The four new tabs are named (approximately) "Featured," including Gmail, YouTube, News, Maps and Transit, "Various search," that hosts links to Image Search, Blog Search, Books and Google Desktop, "Useful tool," with Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Toolbar and, finally, "More enjoyable," and YouTube once again, Picasa, Blogger and Google Earth.

By the looks of it, this revamp will prove to be rather successful, and I dare say that it would be welcomed in other Western markets, because it grants instant access to the Google slew of services. Right now, until the Mountain View based company manages to link all the accounts in the mega-project dubbed Google Accounts, it’s a tad more difficult to pull such operability through.

"Our fundamental strategy is to take ideas from Japan and apply them to other markets," Emmanuel Sauquet of Google told Business Week, in regards to his company’s mobile strategy. Will this also affect the other policies and strategies as well, like changing the default homepage for everybody? Gosh, I hope so, the Japan page looks almost too good to be true!

Microsoft Touts the Superiority of Dynamics AX 4.0 over Oracle 11.0.3 - In terms of cost savings

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Microsoft has applauded the superiority of its own Dynamics AX 4.0 over Oracle 11.0.3 in terms of the cost reduction it will provide to customers. It were in fact major cost savings that have prompted supply chain integrator PACCESS to opt for Dynamics AX 4.0, Microsoft's enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution is less expensive to maintain and more capable of satisfying the PACCESS' needs, the Redmond company
argued, in comparison with Oracle 11.0.3.

"We tried to add five users, but we would have had to pay Oracle $365,000 because of a license-model change," said Nina Palludan, vice president of IT for PACCESS. "The five-year total cost of ownership for Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 was more than $1 million less than Oracle’s, even though we already owned the Oracle software. Actually rebuying the Oracle e-business suite would have cost less than upgrading our current licenses."

The expensive upgrades to its Oracle system turned PACCESS toward Microsoft. The Redmond company pointed out that Dynamics AX 4.0 was not only highly scalable and adaptable, but also less costly. And in this context one of the aspects which contributed to cutting down costs was the fact that Dynamics AX 4.0 uses the same graphical user interface as the Office System, which helped cut down training costs for employees.

"Global companies are finding ways to simultaneously save money and advance their processes with the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics AX," said Michael Park, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s U.S. Dynamics business. "Companies that seek new business management systems are looking for solutions that are simpler to use, less costly to own and easier to scale than their existing solutions. Around the world, companies are finding these benefits in Microsoft Dynamics AX, an ERP solution designed for growing businesses."