Here’s a chance to show off your marketing skills.

A large company comes to you with a product it spent five years building. This thing is huge - truly an amazing endeavour, involving armies of engineers. It’s a new version of a product more than half a billion people use in their daily lives. Only, they haven’t worked out quite how to sell this thing. What, exactly, is it for? And why is anyone going to buy the new product to replace an existing one that works perfectly well?

This is the position Microsoft’s marketers find themselves in as they prepare for the official Vista launch in New York this Thursday. A year ago, in an early attempt to answer the Big Question ("Why Vista?"), Windows honcho Jim Allchin tried to encapsulate it in a single word: "More."

"More"? Well, more security, more ease of use, more of just about everything you want from an operating system. Only, "more" is not exactly going to make any product fly off the shelf. (It’s interesting to speculate what would have happened to Vista if Ray Ozzie had arrived at Microsoft a few years earlier. A year ago, he told me that the trick behind every successful software project is to decide in advance exactly what the end result is meant to achieve, then write a draft press release describing the finished product before even starting on the development. That is not easy to do for something with so varied a group of users as Vista, but it would certainly have helped.)

So why buy the new software? These are four reasons offered by Microsoft executives (and no, the new 3D user interface, Aero, is not one of them):

It’s easier to find stuff. Spend too much time hunting for files on your PC or recreating ones you lost? A new unified search index (common to the one in the new Office) will help. The trouble is, desktop search already does a lot of this and the advances in Vista may be hard to see.

Less hassle for mobile workers. The machine powers down and up from "stand-by" more quickly, and files you write while waiting in an airport synchronise with the servers back in the office so you’re less likely to lose documents. That hardly seems enough, though, to make a road warrior hammer on the IT department’s door demanding an upgrade.

Better security. Ah, that’s more like it - something that plays to the paranoia of both IT managers and business execs. The Service Pack 2 upgrade to Windows XP (released two years ago) was really a full-fledged new version of the software built on more secure foundations, but it seems the arms race against the bad guys has moved on. Mind you, noone will feel happy having to pay up for this.

Cheaper to run. Finally, a reason everyone can understand. Make it simpler for a central IT person to patch, upgrade or otherwise maintain a company’s PCs, and you make it possible to redeploy (or otherwise dispose of) all those expensive bodies currently engaged in doing the job. And let’s face it, who’s going to shed a tear for the unloved IT help desk? Expect a blizzard of "research" from Microsoft that "proves" how much companies can save with Vista, with pay-back periods from the investment of under one year.

Now, would anyone care to offer a slogan?

Richard Waters, San Francisco

November 29th, 2006 in Software | Permalink