In Battle Gear: Microsoft Reboots With Pointsperson For Windows

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Kolkata: He hops from one city to another to meet prospective and existing customers and his colleagues at various locations, and even journalists and public relations executives, to drive home his message: the value of Microsoft’s Windows operating system (OS).

Abhijit Das, Microsoft’s manager for platform strategies, is the Windows evangelist. At the end of the year, the world’s largest software company measures his contribution to its annual resource basket by the level of interest and excitement he has generated among customers.

A few years back, Microsoft had no one to rival its platform dominance. It had one platform to serve all corporate computing needs, from desktop and communication to database and storage.

But, things began changing when the little Penguin landed on Indian shores in the late nineties. Linux, OS with an open source code, challenged Microsoft’s Windows campaign of being the only OS that provides business value across the enterprise business segments.

Now, Microsoft has a dedicated person who will talk only about Windows. Mr Das has a single-point agenda — to hammer home Windows’ superiority over other OS, particularly Linux.

Before him there was no one at Microsoft to talk exclusively about Windows. Marketing heads hawking software like MS Office or MS Exchange threw in the Windows bit as an ‘addendum’ to their sales pitch.

Since Microsoft’s applications like Office productivity suite and SQL enterprise database run only on Windows, the math was simple. Sell more Windows, and you get higher sales of application software, especially the Office suite, which account for a major share of Microsoft’s $32 billion global revenue.

IT professionals like Santanu Paul, general manager operations of Virtusa (India) Pvt Ltd feels it is critical from Microsoft’s strategic perspective to control OS. Virtusa, the US-based IT consulting firm is working on the deployment of Linux based applications across enterprises. “Windows has been unimaginably successful as a client-side OS, as well as a strong success as a server-side OS, especially for small and medium business segments,” said Mr Paul.

Mr Das joined Microsoft in January. Though the post was created a year back, he was the first person to be given the specific task of carrying forward the Windows message of secure, reliable and value for money computing environment with large numbers of independent software vendors working to develop application around the platform.