Winning back user confidence is key to Microsoft`s strategy for the success of the next generation of its operating system, productivity suite and server platform, say senior executives.
This follows a week after the beta 2 release for all three products.
The group is detailing and demonstrating new elements of Windows Vista, Office 2007 and the latest version of Windows "Longhorn" Server at the two-day EMEA region reviewers` forum in London this week.
"We recognise there were a lot of things we didn`t do well in the past and that is why, for this next generation of products, we have gone back to the drawing board," said Chris Flores, Microsoft group product manager for Windows Vista, in one of the keynote sessions yesterday.
Flores highlighted several areas of innovation within Vista aimed at delivering new user experiences, pointing to some of the features such as the enhanced Web page printing facility in the latest version of Internet Explorer.
"IE 7 also has multiple layers of security. We have really battened down the hatches this time to help restore user confidence," he said.
The next generation of products was being driven by Microsoft`s vision of empowering people with the goals of advancing business, managing complexity, protecting information and amplifying the impact of users, said Mauro Meanti, servers and tools GM for EMEA.
"By reducing complexity of products, we empower IT professionals to make decisions while letting the software do all the groundwork to enable those decisions," he explained.
According to Michael Hartmann, senior director for the Windows client business group in EMEA, the biggest issue for most users was not capacity but the ability to find the right information quickly.
"We are spending too much time trying to find information. Providing a new way to find and store information is one of the most important value propositions of Vista," he said.
In addition to finding data faster and easier through contextual search facilities found throughout Vista, Hartmann said the latest version of the Windows operating system and other core products were focused on providing improved security, increased mobility and lower cost of ownership.
Finally, Microsoft`s next-generation products were characterised as the company`s response to the dramatic shift in the past 10 years towards what Christoph Bischoff, director of the information worker business unit for Microsoft, Germany, described as a "digital workstyle".
Bischoff said the focus of enterprise software was no longer only on creating information, but was more involved in driving business processes, enabling collaboration across various boundaries, developing insights, and facilitating actions based on those insights.
"A new world of work has dawned and new software applications must be developed in recognition and support of that fact," he said.
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