Windows Vista Weblog

Ballmer: It’s Vista and Office and Exchange, but it’s also the launch of a wave of products, some of which ship immediately and some of which come out over the next year or so. Number one, we enhance our traditional value proposition, in terms of end-user, individual productivity. When we say things like, the Ribbon changes everything, I really mean it. The Ribbon [part of Office 2007’s user interface] changes everything. There are things in both Windows Vista and in Office that dramatically enhance individual productivity.

Number two, what we’re shipping with SharePoint, with Exchange, with enterprise content management, in terms of workflow and document management, we also make this the transition between individual productivity and people being able to tie their individual productivity into the information and workflow of their business processes. Exchange is critical to that. SharePoint is critical to that. Excel Services is an important piece of that for business intelligence. Enterprise search is an important part of it.

The third piece is bringing this all home for IT people by reducing the cost of management, improving the security of these systems, and the level of compliance and the tools for information compliance that are built in. And of course it’s all available in a way that developers can tailor.

IW: It all sounds good. Yet we also know some of your business customers are running old software, Windows 98, NT, Windows 2000, and Exchange 5.5. What’s going to be the thing that grabs their attention and really drives adoption?

Ballmer: In the business market, people are grabbed at different times in different places for different reasons, and maybe even inside an organisation for different users. It requires alignment of the following factors: We’ve got to fit in the [upgrade] cycle of the customer. Customers’ cycles are determined in part by our upgrade cycles and in part by other business requirements. Number two, we’ve got to galvanise people with the business value these technologies bring so that they’re motivated to move up their cycle times or to include these products as they go through their normal refresh cycle. A lot of people will move in the first year, a lot will move in the second year, and yet there will probably be people who still haven’t moved in years 3, 4, 5.