Interview with Lorraine Maina of Microsoft East and Southern Africa on Open Day.
This is an interview that I had with Lorraine Maina of Microsoft East and Southern Africa on the Microsoft Open Day which is being held this week on the 8th of December 2010 in Nairobi, Kenya at the Westgate and Sarit Centre Malls.
Microsoft’s Open Day is targeting Application Developers, IT Professionals and Channel Partners in Kenya. Some of the highlights of the interview include:
- Samsung will be launching Windows Phone 7 smartphones in January 2011 here in Kenya.
- The XBOX Kinect will be demonstrated in detail at the Open Day.
- That you can buy Microsoft Office for as little as Kes. 2,000.00 for home and student use in Kenya.
Interview with Lorraine Maina of Microsoft East and Southern Africa. from Moses Kemibaro on Vimeo.
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4 Comments
Just watched the interview, sadly i missed the open day but must say i appreciate Microsoft’s bid to engage the Kenyan IT fraternity and its Customer base in a manner that closely identifies with the local market dynamics -sort of down to earth approach.
Unfortunately as you tritely mentioned Microsoft products are viewed as rather upmarket and many potential customers zone out when they hear of Microsoft products.Again, though Lorraine mentions that Microsoft prides itself with value partners such as Dell, HP… etc ;the majority of computer users in Kenya use cloned products with pre-installed counterfeit/non genuine software.It is important for Microsoft to review its pricing structure and brand perception locally for them to make an appreciable level of impact.
Thanks for capturing the interview Digitally musing on it i am able to gauge where Microsoft is going in terms of its products, market access and pricing.Kudos!
.-= Nairobian Perspective´s last blog ..Kenya WikiLeaks Cables!!! =-.
[…] in East Africa. Unfortunately, I was unable to do a
video interview with Vincent as I did in the last one with Lorraine
Maina so I ended up doing an audio […]
What can I say… I can’t hold it against MS for venturing
into the East African market, but we shouldn’t be brain washed into
thinking the MS is the only way to go. It’s an open-source world.
Linux is the future of IT in my humble opinion. Robust open-source
software distributions geared to specific tasks exist, and some of
them are on par if not better than MS in most cases. I hope The
Kenyan IT community sees that there’s more out there than just MS
products.
I would have liked to ask her why microsoft is making it so had for us budding programmers to get Visual Studio free. Sun or should I say oracle makes their JDK available free. Given Java can be used to rewrite any application written in VB and run indiscriminately on any platform they should tread carefull