The Sikh Geek

At WWPC, I was on a focus group for discussing selling Vista in Small Businesses and it was a moderated discussion by an independent third party, Market Decisions. The concensus was that Vista was being held back because of Application Compatibility and key business applications not running or being supported on Vista. No matter how hard Microsoft try to convince us that this isn’t an issue, we know the reality.

At the end of the session Jacqueline Boyle (who worked at Microsoft UK for 6 years), Marketing Manager for Vista, outlined the case for selling the premium SKU for Vista which are :-

• Security (healthcare, financial, legal, etc)
• Dual Use (owner mangers who take their laptops home and want to use it for home entertainment)
• Multilingual Support

In terms of the Marketing approach she asked the group whether the messaging should be “Towards pleasure, or away from pain”. I think we all voted for “towards pleasure”!