Microsoft Vista: Companies Can Wait

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"All those things have huge benefits," says Kevin Johnson, co-president of Microsoft's platform and services division, which makes Windows.

Data-Sharing Advantages

Microsoft strove to make Office 2007 a better way to access data that sits on servers, the computers that run Web sites and corporate networks. That includes sales figures, strategic plans, and employee information. The company is betting that letting users tap into that data with the familiar applications, such as Excel and Outlook, will unleash information that's largely trapped and out of reach of many users. "For companies, access to business information—not having to pay for expensive business intelligence systems, making it possible for people to find information and get that business insight—that's what's important for them," says Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's business division, which makes the Office software.

And despite naysaying among analysts, Microsoft can point to plenty of eager customers among those who tested the software. Pacific Life Insurance began testing Vista on 50 PCs in August and found it immediately lowered costs. It reduced individual installations from four hours of employee time to less than five minutes, freeing up workers for other tasks. And simplified remote access reduced help-desk call time so much so that Pacific Life Chief Technical Officer Cameron Cosgrove expects to shift one of his employees off desktop support to another project. "That's the biggest driver for us—it's going to lower our total cost of ownership," Cosgrove says. He plans to roll out Vista to the 1,100 PCs he manages within the next two months.

Del Monte Foods (DLM) plans to be nearly as aggressive rolling out Office 2007. The company began testing the software on six PCs in May and found that it improved employee efficiency. The new software makes it much easier to share and update common PowerPoint slides used frequently throughout the company. Workers developing formulas for new products loved the built-in analytics in Excel, says Jonathan Wynn, business lead of Del Monte's strategic and capacity planning. The company won't upgrade to Vista immediately because many of the other non-Microsoft applications used by Del Monte aren't yet compatible with it. But that won't stop the company from rolling out Office 2007, which it expects to deploy in half of its 3,400 PCs within six months. "We see big advantages to moving to Office first," Wynn says. "We want to be ahead of the curve."

Now the challenge for Microsoft is to convince other tech buyers that they can use the new products to get ahead as well. If analysts are right, it won't be easy.

Greene is BusinessWeek's Seattle bureau chief. With Peter Burrows in Silicon Valley.