Microsoft: Windows 7 About Business, Not Features

Microsoft’s Windows 7 will introduce far fewer features (beefed up security and improved mobility behind the firewall just about sums it up) than one might expect from a new operating system.

The new OS also ditches the concept of “Ultimate Extras,” a poorly-executed effort to up-sell users to the highest-cost version of Vista by promising to update their systems with new “cutting-edge” features as they came out of beta.

Mary-Jo Foley, at sister-site ZDNet.com, asks her readers if any of the new features have caught their fancy, or if not, “what would you hope to see in a future version of Windows that would win you over?”

But selling Windows 7 to business customers isn’t about new feature sets.

Microsoft understands that IT chiefs aren’t going to be sold on whiz-bang functionality that makes their internal customers happier–especially in this economic environment.

Business customers are looking for a way of lowering their costs immediately and into the foreseeable future, and this is where Microsoft believes it can make a compelling argument.

Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, told analysts at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference this week that Microsoft is focused on reassuring customers about productivity and cost savings now and in the future.

You know, when you’re in an enterprise agreement discussion with a customer, you get into a lot of discussions about how much value they’ve derived from the agreement, how they feel about the economics, and things like that. But fundamentally what you’re selling, let’s say a renewal of an enterprise agreement, is the promise of the future, what the next generation of products holds, what they should expect to see in terms of upgrades, and so forth.

The way enterprise agreements work, customers get every upgrade Microsoft makes to products covered by the agreement for free throughout the term of that agreement, guaranteeing enterprise customers cost-certainty without sacrificing functionality.

Microsoft intends to use Windows 7 to keep its foot in the door by making it just attractive enough for decision-makers to re-up with Microsoft; this is why, despite its atrociously-long development cycles, it was able to ship the successor to Vista in, what for Microsoft, is record time.

Microsoft does intend to wow customers with new functionality where it has “doubled-down” its bets, said Elop: online versions of Office and SharePoint.

It also hopes to displace traditional telecom equipment vendors like Avaya and Cisco with its Unified Communications platform, a marriage of telephony and computing technologies using the IP network.

Office, SharePoint and Unified Communications represent, “the strongest story in terms of the future, and what we can do for productivity, for cost-savings, and a variety of other things than we’ve had in a long time,” said Elop.