Interesting article on device driver compatibility in Vista and Windows 7, AND a solution selling take the topic

This PCMag.com article (Will My Device Work with Windows 7?) brings out some interesting facts that you may not have known about device compat and availability for Windows 7 (and Vista as well).  But actually my main point with this post isn’t to plug the article but try to give you some food for thought around solution selling and how to “up your game” and help your customers think more strategically.

As you should already know, I’ve been doing SB2 events this year and the main subject in the SB2 events is the “Vista Customer Conversation” which revolves around helping our partner base deal with the negative perceptions of Vista that cause some folks to want to stay on legacy OSes for the wrong (or less than optimal) reasons in many cases.  One of the main areas of Vista negative perception is around device driver compatibility and availability.  Now, to be sure there have been compatibility and availability issues around VIsta, so the negative perception has roots in the real world, so, in the SB2 events (and in the webcasts I’ve done around the SB2 event content which you can access from the Partner Learning Center, see links at bottom of post) we discuss why these negative perceptions are happening and what you can do to mitigate them.  Unfortunately, in the face of some driver issues, customers, and unfortunately sometimes partners, revert to the “stay on XP” solution.  So that’s why I want to interject some solution selling thoughts around that into this post.  In my events lately I’ve been challenging my partners, when faced with driver availability and compatibility issues, to consider the following approach, that incorporates a selling technique known as “latent pain” which is indentifying pain that a customer doesn’t know that they have.  In this case, when a customer indicates they “can’t move to Vista because they need to use a legacy device (e.g. a device that doesn’t have functional Vista drivers)”, my suggestions is to consider asking the customer the following question: “Ok, so let me understand this -- the use of this legacy device is more important to your business than protection of your company data.  In other words, the costs for you to replace, or recover from loss, or compromise of, the company data is less than the replacement cost of that device, is that correct?”.  You might also extend the question to bring in the additional aspects of the productivity savings that accrue through less vulnerability to malware or leveraging better ways to find and use data in your infrastructure.  But essentially what you’ve done here is to make sure the customer understands that there is “potential” (latent) pain that can be avoided with Vista and that that pain may well be a lot more costly than the pain of implementing the solution.  To amplify, what you’d be helping the customer understand here is that right now on XP, even though it seems secure (since they’ve likely not had any breaches or successful malware attacks or loss of data), they ARE at higher risk of malware issues (stats show us XP is 60% more susceptible).  Moreover, their sensitive data that exists on servers or desktops or laptops is not protected against loss or unauthorized access if someone were to gain physical access to it via a USB key or if a laptop is lost/stolen.  So what you’re helping them to do is realize the real potential cost of staying on legacy technology.  In this particular case, is the cost of replacing a $2k network printer or scanner less than the cost of replacing/recovering lost data or mitigating unauthorized access to that data?  Of course, with BitLocker protection, Vista can insure that data, even on a drive that a bad guy now has physical possession of, is not compromised, and in the case of USB, you can also secure USB ports against use of unauthorized USB devices through Group Policy in Vista.  Hopefully, you can put the rest of it together, so my main point here is to challenge you, my partner, with thinking past the obvious path of just accepting what would appear to be a limitation and making a tactical decision, but instead thinking beyond that to what the future impact of accepting that limitation is and making sure your customer is making the best strategic decision.  IMHO this is how trusted advisors are made.  Oh, and btw, you make some additional revenue, and if you’ve been following my SB2 content, you also know that Vista, with Reliability Monitor, System Health report, self-healing capabilities, and the new Event model, is not only more secure, but way easier to support than XP, that how cool is that.  And, of course, all these points will still hold true for Windows 7 as well, since it incorporates basically the same device driver model (updated from WDDM v1.0 to v1.1) and support tools.

https://training.partner.microsoft.com/plc/details.aspx?publisher=12&delivery=259897 and

https://training.partner.microsoft.com/plc/details.aspx?publisher=12&delivery=260423