Thursday, November 22, 2007 Ng: Top brands in 2007 By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
I AM going over a report in CNET about the top global technology brands in 2007. One thing good about this report is that it allows you to understand trends, especially on consumer and corporate buying preferences. Needless to say, the brands that are strong in a particular year are normally the preferred ones and have high marketability.
A complete report can be gleaned from http://www.news.com).
The first study was made by Interbrand. According to Interbrand, the top 10 brands this year are: Microsoft, IBM, Nokia, Intel, HP, Cisco, Google, Samsung, Sony and Oracle.
It is interesting to know that Apple did not show up in the first study but was cited in the second (SAP and Apple were in the second study not in the first; Samsung and Sony were in the first study but not in the second. The other eight brands were the same).
Both studies, however, agreed that Apple and Samsung were the two brands that were moving up fast.
It is noteworthy that Samsung is now more popular than any Japanese brand, including Sony. There was a time when Samsung was known mainly as a copycat consumer electronics company, but it now has diverse offerings even in information technology starting from monitors, hard disks, optical drives, printers and memory components.
In cell phones, Samsung is now world number two, next to Nokia, having already overtaken Motorola.
In fact, according to strategy Analytics, global mobile phone shipments grew 12 percent in the third quarter of 2007 compared to one year ago, and hit 285 million. Nokia shipped 111.7 million cell phones, Samsung 42.6 million and
Motorola 37.2 million. Sony Ericsson came in fourth place with 25.9 milllion units while LG shipped 21.9 million.
The rest of other brands had a total shipment of 45.7 million units.
In contrast, hard disk prices are also fueling more capacity, as well as lower prices. According to iSuppli, a California based market research firm, there were 134 million hard drives shipped in the third quarter of 2007 compared to 114 million for the same quarter last year. This is a 21 percent increase, and indicates that the growth of personal computers is as strong as the growth of cell phones. This is an indication that personal computers are, by no means, becoming obsolete.
Six hard drive vendors also lord it over the others. These are Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Toshiba and Samsung. Although in many countries hard disk sizes are fast normalizing at 300 gigabytes to 500 gigabyte disks, in Asia, the best sellers are still in the 80 gigabyte to 160 gigabyte range.
Do we really need such a big storage? For some yes, but for some no. In the last few months, we see in our local market companies that are starting to consider thin client computers that are powered by one-gigabyte to four-gigabyte solid state drives (these are disk drives that have no moving parts akin to the memory that are used in thumb drives which retains the data even without power—unlike the RAM chips of the computer which loses data the moment it is powered down).
If the PC is for personal use, yes, we need to have a big hard disk to store digital songs, pictures, video and, yes, games. But for a pure corporate setting where the important files are stored in the server anyway, and the company dictates only a handful (or maybe even just one application) to run, then a one-gigabyte to four-gigabyte hard disk is enough.
In fact, this disk space range is preferred so that employees will not store personal pictures, downloads or games inside their machines. So in some cases, companies prefer smaller capacity drives (only 10- to 20-gigabyte hard disks cannot be found nowadays) to make the system more manageable.
Finally, one trend that is worthy of notice is the increase in usage of Internet web advertising. In the United States, advertising has started to shift towards the Web. The numbers had gone up 25 percent to $5.2 billion in the third quarter of 2007.
For the first nine months of 2007, Web advertising spending totaled $15.2 billion already, 25 percent more than the first nine months of 2006.
