Microsoft Opens A Window on a New Vista
Wednesday, November 29, 2006SUSIE GHARIB: Tomorrow is a landmark day for Microsoft. The company is making its new windows Vista operating system available to its biggest corporate customers. To introduce it, Microsoft is planning a billion dollar marketing campaign, beginning by ringing the opening bell at the NASDAQ. Tonight, New York bureau chief Scott Gurvey previews Vista and looks at its impact on the industry and Microsoft's bottom line.
SCOTT GURVEY, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: Five years in the making, an eternity in the world of personal computers, Windows Vista is the latest incarnation of Microsoft's ubiquitous operating system, now found on 90 percent of the world's PCs. Bill Gates personally ordered a rewrite of Vista halfway through the development process to improve security and stability. Most reviewers say the work paid off.
LANCE ULANOFF, EDITOR, REVIEWS, PC MAGAZINE: Microsoft has done a great job of improving security, improving controls, protecting users from themselves. But that doesn't mean that it is impenetrable and I don't think Microsoft is even saying that. But I think that the ability to recover from attacks and to protect against them has certainly gone many levels up.
GURVEY: Vista sports a new graphic interface, at least on computers with advanced graphics capabilities. Older computers will not have the pretty images, but all will have new features. Critics complain many of these are already available on rival Apple's computers, but they will be new to the Windows platform. Also available for the first time tomorrow will be Office 2007, the new version of Microsoft's best selling application suite. The look and feel of Office has been significantly changed to make it easier for users to find the advanced features of Word, Excel and Power Point. Some experienced users may be confused, but Microsoft is confident the learning curve will be reasonable.
MICHAEL SIEVERT, CORPORATE VICE PRESIDENT, WINDOWS CLIENT MARKETING: More than five million people downloaded these operating systems and software packages during their development and tested them and gave us feedback on these things. So we've had a community of people involved in the development of them and that's how we have a lot of confidence that people are going to love them when they try the final product.
GURVEY: In fact, some analysts believe companies adopting the new Office suite will encourage computer sales for the home.
TED SCHADLER, ANALYST, FORRESTER RESEARCH: Consumers are also employees. If they have a computer that they use at work and maybe they bring that computer home, then Office is a big part of the story here for a company or for a consumer who is working for a company. So if you're a work from homer, Windows and Office go together. If you have a new version of Office, you're going to get a new version of windows and a new PC.
GURVEY: As of tomorrow, big corporate clients can download Vista and Office from Microsoft, but most will test the products for some time before rolling it out. Computer manufacturers already have the products and are expected to pre-load them on new systems by the end of January. Retail boxes for people interested in upgrading should appear in the stores at the same time.
RICK SHERLUND: The benefit of that will be more of the consumer cycle and we'll see that beginning at the end of January and that lasts about a year or so. Then the small business market a year or two years and then starting in about two years, the corporate market really begins to upgrade in a big way to the new desktop products.
GURVEY: Goldman Sachs has an investment banking relationship with Microsoft. Microsoft promises the next version of Windows in less than five years, but it has said little about what it will look like. Scott Gurvey, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, New York.
