Across on his blog Andy Bryce has written some very good reasons for why he won’t be bothering with the round of Windows 7 logos marketing Microsoft has launched. First I should point out that there is a difference between the “Compatible with Windows 7 logo” and associated marketing materials and the “Certified For” program run by Microsoft. The latter, I’m in full agreement with Andy. I saw no benefit in the Vista version and see no beneift in the Windows 7 version.
Rather we’re talking about the logo to the left of this article.
Andy writes:
First I can answer Andy directly. Yes, I started receiving marcom (marketing communications) from Microsoft well before the Windows 7 launch and long before the RTM was released to MSDN subscribers.
However…
I have made use of the logo, but more importantly I’ve made use of the press release too, for a couple of reasons that I view as important. Your mileage may vary.
- The logo is a massive improvement over Microsoft’s previous logos. It’s not to bad at all.
- The press release that is a requirement to show the logo contains lots of juicy keywords. Perfect material for blogs – and all of my product sites have blogs thirsty for keyword rich material. At no time did I or do I expect the press to snap to attention on the reciept of one of these press releases and say “By George! MixAction Software And Audio Pty Ltd products are fully Windows 7 compatible – STOP THE PRESSES!”
- I’m weary of writing two sets of code for multimedia support between XP and Vista/Windows 7. If only a handfull of people viewing my sites get the twitch to upgrade to Windows 7 it’ll make my life a hell of a lot easier. For that reason I’m content to assist Microsoft in their marketing.
So each of our products have a Windows 7 Compatible logo and accompanying press release. After release of the press release I saw – and still see – poeple searching and coming into the sites with keywords related to the products but specifying “Windows 7″. That was my intent. It’s worked. It’s not a huge number mind – but it’s probably more than my competitors are getting because they aren’t talking about Windows 7 at all!
At the end of the day – as Micro ISV’s – even a handfull of visitors for the ten minutes it took to rework Microsoft’s press release template are worth coaxing.
Will post soon on new product releases and a restructure of our company.
Scott Kane
Playing SEO games isn’t constructive. NOTHING beats a clean one page site. When I deliver my program to the world I’ll prove it to you.
I must be getting old. After a while, watching the steady stream of new versions of Windows come and go makes me very unenthusiastic about putting too much into the latest offering. I’m generally late to take advantage of the latest OS features because I know that I will lose customers who are using older versions.
Yes, I can certainly understand why you’d want to inform your customers that you worked with the latest version, but these days I wish it was a little easier to write software that worked on many different versions of Windows, rather than focusing on just the latest version.