Celebrating 20 years of Windows, Microsoft Canada, held an event in Toronto to not only commemorate the evolution of the OS but to provide a peek of what is to come.Celebrating 20 years of Windows, Microsoft Canada, held an event in Toronto to not only commemorate the evolution of the OS but to provide a peek of what is to come.
Speaking to industry media and analysts, division president David Hemler said that in the coming decades PCs are going to redefine how we work and live. “We feel like we’re just scratching the surface on PC capabilities,” he said.
Bill Gates’ vision of a computer on every desktop around the world has turned into Windows on every device, Jeff Parker, founder of Directions on Microsoft, an industry analyst said in an interview.
“It’s the broadening of the vision from this clunky box to the most improbable tools like pocket PCs, portable video players and tablet PCs,” he added.
Microsoft has run vigorously to the pace of the different directions that PC has take, both with consumer and corporate users, Parker said.
In Canada, that pace has largely been carried through the company’s 11,000 partners, all of whom use Windows in some form or another, said Hemler.
“We actually have a study in market right now to assess the economic impact of our partner program in Canada because we think it’s significant,” he added.
Results of that study will be released in the coming months.
As Microsoft enters the third decade of Windows with its next version of the operating system, code-named Vista —scheduled for release in late 2006 — the software giant will continue to rely on partners to move the product to market.
A lot of work is being done internally, Hemler said, to have a consolidated view of the channel to understand its abilities.
“We’re in the early stages of working to increase the capabilities of our partners and work with them to identify both partner and customer early adopters, in order to get some of the proof points (of Vista),” he explained.
At the Toronto event Microsoft showcased some of its partners, such as Toronto’s Panorama Software.
As a pure play partner, it takes a big risk in not developing and supporting other platforms, said Lee Ho, Panorama’s vice-president of marketing.
“But if you look at what Microsoft has done from a Windows perspective, from an applications perspective, what it provides to a company like ours is a very extensible platform with depth, breadth and opportunities to develop additional apps and solutions on top of that.”
He also boosted Vista’s potential for business to take advantage of business intelligence through communications and collaboratation.
Asked what improvements Vista will offer, Hemler gave examples from different use perspectives.
Microsoft is working on the deployment and manageablility issues IT workers had with previous versions, he said, to make them much easier.
“Vista is going to allow business end users better decision- making capabilities, enabling connectivity, mobility and even the use of hand writing,” said Hemler.
According to IDC Canada analyst Dave Senf, Microsoft is “building out as they have in the past, a platform on which ISVs and developers can build applications that are useful to organizations in whatever vertical they might be.”
But it’s going to be a challenge, said Senf, to take the large installed base of Windows 2000 or Windows XP and move it onto Vista.
“It’s a different value proposition with organizations. It’s ‘Show me how it saves money, show me how it grows my revenue, show me how it makes my employees more efficient,’” said Senf.
Microsoft is already preparing numbers for that business conversation, said Hemler.