Or the leading Malaysia budget airline company calls it; AAVG. Sounds like the AVG antivirus, doesn’t it?
Not long after the release of Microsoft Vista, Air Asia made its own wave of headlines along side Microsoft promoting its new customer oriented feature called the “gadget”. I only found out about this feature via the paper media today and had several thoughts come to my mind.
A year ago, when good ol Mack Zulkifli was still blogging he highlighted one of my blog entries about Air Asia. It was about Air Asia hiring an solutions developer; TMS, to take charge of its Air Asia website and systems.
What I was interested in back then was how much solution would the company provide the Air Asia website in order the simplify the system and make it easy for customers to use. But it’s also no surprise that I’m still waiting for the vast improvements to Air Asia’s website still. Since 2005, I haven’t seen much change to the Air Asia website.
Anyway, let’s talk about this new “gadget” Air Asia is set on the Vista users here in Malaysia. The “gadget” is really a widget for your desktop. A widget is a small application running on your desktop with the ability to pull syndicated content from a primary source, in this case Air Asia.
The widget experience was first introduced in Apple’s Mac OS X operating system – though some say the first was Konfabulator (now called Yahoo! Widget Engine).
So one of the thoughts in my mind was AirAsia seems to be targeting the business and middle society to use this widget. Why?
Well, how much do you think Windows Vista is going to cost in the market? Need I say more.
The other thought in my mind was what is this “gadget” made out of? The first method in mind was already a widget so I scoured the Internet to do some research before hand. I was right and I found some more interesting facts leading up to this story.
Network World wrote a good 3 page article of Air Asia and their new “gadget”. They even shared some insight if such a “gadget” will work using Windows Vista as a benchmark.
In ZDNetAsia, it’s believed that TMS helped Air Asia develop the widget for Vista so this is to say they made no mistake hiring the company to provide them solutions for their customers.
With all that said, we are most likely to see more businesses taking advantage of the widget platform now. But what I still really want to see Air Asia do is revamp their current online website and make the booking more efficient whilst burden free.
As Steve Krugg’s book title says, “Don’t Make Me Think”.
p.s: I shared my view on why will I not be upgrading to Windows Vista anytime soon.
[tags]Windows Vista, Microsoft, Air Asia, Budget airline, TMS, website solution, usability, widget, Apple, Mac OS X, Yahoo!, Konfabulator, Steve Krugg[/tags]