All featuring the “I’m a PC” slogan, the ads follow four PC users as they go globe-trotting to their respective manufacturer’s HQ, where they then talk about a new feature of Windows 7 that they supposedly wanted in the new OS. The four features mentioned include the new easy-to-use wireless networking features, improved startup times, a great entertainment machine and the new touch features.

“The campaign is an extension of the “My Idea” Windows 7 launch campaign – but this time we went a little ‘larger than life’ with the core creative idea and we used actors to voice the feedback and input we received towards Windows 7 rather than using the real people who participated in our Windows focus groups as featured in our first round of ads” Lisa Hickson, Marketing lead for Consumer and Online at Microsoft Australia said.

“[The result was] A series of entertaining ads, each with a different take on the ‘My Idea’ campaign – and actors representing the thousands of voices that we listened to from across the globe.”

All four ads will be showing across Channel 9, Channel 7 and Channel GO! and you can watch them now on Windows 7 Australia’s YouTube page.

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The company envisions platforms based on industry-standard hardware with software that can change the characteristics of each component as an enterprise’s needs change, executives said at a press briefing on Friday.

Although several major IT vendors are moving to unite computing, storage and networking, HP believes it has an advantage over rivals such as Cisco and IBM because it will let third-party products interoperate with its own and won’t lock customers into specific devices or architectures.

HP’s general-purpose approach will give organizations a cost-effective way to scale up their data centers, taking advantage of the company’s expertise in building computing platforms and its cost advantage as, for example, the largest buyer of memory in the world, according to Jeffrey Hausman, vice president of Unified Storage at HP.

With common hardware, managed by common management software, IT administrators will have fewer things to manage and an architecture that is easier to understand than a collection of distinct computing, storage and networking boxes, Hausman said. While enterprises can benefit from this type of unified system from HP, existing storage systems from other vendors will also be able to plug in and work with it, he added.

Telecommunications is one industry that’s likely to embrace this approach, as carriers seek to quickly roll out new types of profitable services to make up for flagging wireline revenues, Selway said. But businesses across the board have rapidly growing storage needs, with none seeing less than 20 percent data growth over the past year and some seeing as much as 400 percent, according to HP.

The company’s acquisition earlier this year of storage software vendor Ibrix plays a key role in its strategy. Among other things, Ibrix can allocate different parts of an infrastructure to file storage, block storage, virtual tape and other functions, and change that allocation as required. Its capabilities are at the center of the X9000 series of storage platforms, announced last month.

To realize HP’s vision today, various components such as HP’s BladeSystem storage platforms, high-density storage, Ibrix and other components need to be manually combined in most cases, Selway said. For enterprises with petabytes of data to store, the company’s X9720 platform can already be used as a unified system, thanks to some tuning by HP for specific industries such as entertainment, he said. The company plans to work with independent software vendors to make the single-system platform a reality for more types of organizations, Selway said.

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Dell’s vice president for the company’s online unit, Manish Mehta, told Bloomberg that over the past three months alone, the number of people who have started following Dell’s tweets has risen 23 percent. The company’s DellOutlet account, which is home to most of the vendor’s sales announcements, currently has almost 1.5 million followers. But unlike some companies, Dell has made Twitter an integral part of its operation. Bloomberg reported that “more than 100 employees send out the tweets” to customers.

“It’s a very vibrant channel for us and it’s growing aggressively,” Mehta told Bloomberg, referring to Twitter. “It’s not just our reach and growth that has progressed, it’s that it’s happening globally.”

Mehta told Bloomberg that its Twitter accounts are followed by people in 12 countries. Brazil users alone spent $800,000 in the past eight months, he said.

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