A Computer World article reports that Microsoft is building its own web metrics tool that will compete against the highly successful Google Analytics. The Microsoft analytics tool which is coded – Gatineau was reportedly being set for release this summer. According to the report, Ian Thomas who works for Microsoft’s Digital Advertising Solution, was forced to react about Gatineau when a screenshot of its beta stage was leaked out by a guy who used attended a Microsoft function. In his blog, Ian Thomas said that the guy saw a demo of the software but Thomas doesn’t know how the guy was able to get a screenshot of the software.
Because of this leakage, Thomas was forced to admit that indeed, Gatineau is already in the beta stage:
One of the reasons we wanted to wait for our own announcement around the beta functionality is because we wanted to explain where we get our demographic data from. Beta 1 will include the ability to segment data by both age and gender buckets, so you can get more of an idea of what kind of visitors you have.
Although there is no official announcement yet coming from Microsoft, Thomas also wrote in his blog that Gatineau, beta version 1 will most likely to hit this summer, and even invites interested individuals to send them an email if they wish to participate in the beta testing.
Ok, now that it is short of being announced officially, Gatineau, or whatever name Microsoft would wish to call its web analytics tool later on, is indeed in the works. It would be interesting to see how it will fair up with the already established Google Analytics and other web metrics software.
