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I wholeheartedly concur that Microsoft mustget involved with each vertical market and actively engage its’ customers, potential customers and the development community to promote the constructions of applications for specific markets. Legal, healthcare, insurance, government, defense and utilities are all key areas for Microsoft. This is not the late 1980s or 1990s when proprietary operating systems were the order of the day. In the 21st Century the most important criteria for a a successful operating system are: integration and interoperability with existing applications and backwards compatibility with legacy apps; the portability and remote access capabilities of the application and the ability of the application and the concommitant OS to be untethered from a PC to run on myriad devices. Microsoft Windows remains the dominant player in the desktop OS arena with approximately 80% to 85% market share. As the dominant presence, Microsoft has an obligation and a responsibility — particularly now during the economic slump — to reach out to its end user constituency in various verticals and take a leadership role. The life’s blood of any operating system platform can be measured by whether or not it has a robust, thriving third party application ISV community. History has shown us, that any software vendor — Microsoft included — who does not have or who loses the support of the application developer community, will almost certainly wither on the vine. In the late 1980s, for example Banyan VINES established a niche with the US Marine Corps. while IBM’s OS/2 Warp became popular with the banking and financial company. Unfortunately, neither company received widespread support for their platforms outside of their respective niches in one or two verticals. However, the Marine Corps held on to VINES and many banks remained on OS/2 Warp long after Banyan and IBM had stopped actively developing for those platforms. By contrast, Microsoft Windows became a popular choice across many verticals.

You are absolutely right Steve, Microsoft must proactively poll and assist the application vendors and take the pulse of enterprises in various vertical markets and they need to strengthen their existing partnerships and create new ones.

And before I state it, I want to make one thing abundantly clear for the record. I am a Microsoftee, I bleed Microsoft blue.

However, as I mentioned above, this roll out can only be a true measured success if Microsoft gets involved fully with each vertical market and understands what the measures of success would be for each one.

For example, in the area of compatibility, taking the Legal vertical as a start, does it run well with certain litigation applications that are endemic to that specific industry’s desktop? Too often, these vendors have no idea how to handle the change in the desktop and are clueless how to move their applications to the upgraded OS. They then lag behind others and the end user suffers from a severe case, if you can excuse the pun, “behindness”. They say the6y are “gold” partners and that they will be on top of the change, but, they never are.

In the case above, as an advisory, Microsoft should start surveying the large law firms now and make sure that the major application vendors are on track. This would help with both the budgeting process and the planning process, and, help ease the transition.

In respect to the above, if Microsoft can’t do it alone, and, I doubt that they can, or even if they should, they should hire partners within that specific indusry to get garner that information for them.

I would like to know what Ms. Didio thinks about this.

Laura?