I just had to share this…
I’ve blogged a lot recently about the OEM series and why we’re having such a focus on the Vista “customer conversation”, and if you’ve been to one of my events, you know that I show a “Mojave Experiment” slide to make the point that a good demo of Vista can really make a difference. Well, that’s true IF the demo is relevant to the audience, and so I also make the case in the “productivity” demo that you’ve got to show business customers stuff with business value. And, to that end, I even posted a compact version of my productivity demo for you a week or so ago (see my post on 10/29). Well, here’s an excerpt from a recent Network World article interviewing CIOs on why they are bypassing Vista which I believe is very telling and essentially reinforces my point.
Article excerpt -- [A financial industry CIO] adds: "When an end-user would ask us what was different or cool about it, almost everyone pointed to the Aero screen flipping and the new built-in desktop wallpaper. When that's the biggest thing you can show someone, it makes for a tough sell to provision the budget to upgrade to Vista, and combined with the bad press, it's a major uphill battle."
Wow, I’d say amen to that myself – if all Vista had to offer was Flip-3D and new wallpaper, I doubt I’d bother with it either. But, of course, the really sad part is that this CIO, nor apparently any of his staff, had done enough research into the functionality of Vista to understand where the business value is – I agree that Flip-3D is not a business value feature, and as you know I don’t even bother showing that in my demo. But, even sadder, of course, is that fact that Network World publishes this guy’s thoughts essentially setting him up as an example – thus you are left to trust/believe that because this one CIO was unable to find business value in Vista, that in fact, there isn’t any business value, so his lack of due diligence is thus portrayed as weakness on Vista’s part. If it’s not already obvious why “we” have a perception problem, I would submit this as another key piece of evidence. The whole article even begins with a negative premise… Ok, soapbox off now, because the whole point of this is post is really more about encouraging you (our partners and other Microsofties) to look to solution selling principles to find out where the opportunities might be and then be ready to demo some of Vista’s functionality that provides the business value proposition.
Here’s an example of how I might apply what I’m talking about using the above as a hypothetical case: Given the CIO was in the financial sector, and there’s a lot of “productivity” workers there, I’m thinking a show of the search functionality and how it can find metadata, including custom tags, in a range of content types could be very beneficial to this company’s productivity. Also, as a financial company, I’m betting a lot of their data is likely confidential, and if any of it resides on laptops, then leveraging a technology like BitLocker could ensure that info is never at risk in case one of those laptops winds up out of the intended user’s control. And, I could go on, but hopefully you get the idea. BTW, I’m happy that this CIO apparently doesn’t have users who need to search for business info all that much and that he doesn’t need to worry about confidential data being compromised by walking out on a USB drive or if a laptop is lost. But if he was one of your customers, I think you’d want to have that “conversation” with him to make sure, that’s what trusted advisors do.
Just as a PS, here’s some other thoughts on things that could provide business value to this customer: IE 7 enhanced security (unless they’ve already rolled that out on XP), the ability to control use of USB devices (so that confidential data doesn’t walk out on one), mobility enhancements with Mobile Device Center, Complete PC backup (esp if they have laptops), and even tools like Reliability Monitor and System Health reporting depending on how they do support, just to name a few. I thought it was interesting that this CIO never mentioned that there were app compatibility or driver issues holding him back only that he failed to find enough business value, combined with a negative perception promoted by the press. Imagine if he had partner to show him or if the press was as much into sharing thoughts from CIOs who HAVE found VIsta worthy as they are about sharing the thoughts of those who have not. You make the call…