Microsoft Corp’s much-touted Windows 7 made its debut in Taiwan yesterday, with Microsoft Taiwan staging pre-sales events with strong support from local technology partners.
Windows 7 was launched at 7:07pm across the nation, with the main pre-sales event being staged at Kuanghua Digital Plaza (光華數位新天地), a famous one-stop shop for electronic bargains in Taipei.
The launch of the Windows 7 operating system came three years after its predecessor, Windows Vista, failed to excite the market because of the high-end hardware specifications required and complicated features that were not what people wanted.
PHOTO: CHEN YI-CHUAN, TAIPEI TIMES
To make sure this launch would catch consumers’ attention, Microsoft Taiwan rolledout an aggressive promotional campaign in an attempt to increase early sales.
The first 50 people to buy the new software at Kuanghua Plaza walked away with bags of prizes ranging from the latest PCs from Acer Inc (宏碁) and Asustek Computer Inc (華碩), to other tech gadgets worth more than NT$5,000 (US$154).
To hype up the launch and increase sales momentum, Microsoft Taiwan is staging a road show with performances by local artists this weekend at the busy Vieshow Cinemas (威秀影城) area in Xinyi District for consumers to get first-hand experience of the software.
PHOTO: NICKY LOH, REUTERS
In the US, the software giant celebrated the launch of Windows 7 with parties and by opening its first retail shop in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Thursday. The Redmond, Washington-based company is scheduled to open a second Microsoft store in California next week, the company said.
Microsoft Taiwan has joined with retailers, including 7-Eleven convenience stores, for their pre-sales promotion.
Pre-sales numbers show that Windows 7 is proving a better bet than Vista. Electronics and communications chain Tsann Kuen Enterprise Co (燦坤), which introduced a pre-sales promotion for Windows 7 late last month, said orders were beyond expectations.
“We had about 600 orders by Thursday and this compares with fewer than 100 orders when we did the pre-sales for Vista,” said Shanon Hsieh (謝霈萁) of Tsann Kuen’s public relations department.
There are approximately 8,000 applications that have been Windows 7 certified and in Taiwan alone, more than 100 PCs and notebooks from 19 different brands have been unveiled in conjunction with the Windows 7 launch, said Davis Tsai (蔡恩全), general manager of Microsoft Taiwan.
When Lika Megreladze was a child, life in her native western Georgian region of Guria revolved around tea. Her mother worked for decades as a scientist at the Soviet Union’s Institute of Tea and Subtropical Crops in the village of Anaseuli, Georgia, perfecting cultivation methods for a Georgian tea industry that supplied the bulk of the vast communist state’s brews. “When I was a child, this was only my mum’s workplace. Only later I realized that it was something big,” she said. Now, the institute lies abandoned. Yellowed papers are strewn around its decaying corridors, and a statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin
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