The Vista business proposition - or lack of it
Prompted by the coverage (
here at News.com for example) of Jim Allchin's recent "Vista" tour of US press and analysts, I got to thinking about the business proposition for the next release of the Windows operating system - or lack of it. To date, Microsoft has focussed its messaging at its natural audiences: the developer (with WCF, WPF, WWF...) and the IT Pro (with a raft of security enhancements, simplified deployment ...). However, with the IT budget holders still maintaining a firm grip on the purse strings, Microsoft really must begin talking to other key stakeholders.
With our focus on IT-business alignment here at MWD, I believe the Redmond marketers need to explain Vista capabilities in terms of the business outcomes they enable (and to do so pretty sharpish, given that deployment is likely to take at least 18 months following any decision to go ahead). They should begin with the largely consumer-oriented messaging around the three pillars of Vista:
Confident - Security & Privacy (UAP, anti-spyware), Deployment & Servicing (image management, event logging), Performance (smart caching, disk optimisation) and Reliability (enhanced crash analysis and diagnostics, hardware monitoring)
Clear - Visualisation (3-D UI, sidebar), Browse, Search, Subscribe (tabbed browsing, shrink-to-fit printing), Information Management (quick search, virtual folders) and Photos, Music and Media (picture and video library, DVD burning)
Connected - Any Time, Any Place (wireless networking, application firewalls), Systems and Software (peer-to-peer platform, web services), Devices (auxiliary displays, universal syncing), People (ad-hoc workgroups, network projection)
and refine them in terms that will appeal more directly to business decision makers (plus the systems integrators and managed desktop service providers acting as a proxy for those decision makers).
This is not going to be easy. There is not a direct correlation between the capabilities that Microsoft associates with each of the pillars and business outcomes, just as there is not a direct mapping between stovepiped technologies and what actually happens in the day-to-day activities of most businesses. For example, Microsoft should couch capabilities such as peer-to-peer platform, the creation of ad-hoc workgroups and mobility enhancements in terms of enabling organisations to transition from employee to organisational productivity through enhanced collaboration. Similarly, combine Windows Workflow Foundation, web services and search enhancements and position them as enablers of process-based, rather than task-based, automation (particularly for the more ad-hoc, collaborative aspects of business processes which are dependent on unstructured information).
I realise I have only scratched the surface but I think it highlights that Microsoft has some way to go if it is to persuade businesses to make the significant investment associated with a large scale desktop OS migration.
