Telecom subsidiary Gen-i and paper and packaging distributor BJ Ball are among local companies already testing Microsoft's latest operating system - Windows 7 - which was released in a near-final version yesterday.
The "release candidate" version of Windows 7 will be available for download from Microsoft's website for a month.
While still open to minor tweaking by designers, release candidate software is typically the version used by Microsoft's corporate customers to test how the system will work for them.
Software developers, hardware makers and other partners also base their next-generation products on this version because they trust that it's stable and close to finished.
Microsoft published the Vista release candidate about five months before the final version went on sale to consumers.
If Windows 7 were to follow the same trajectory, it could be available by the start of October.
Officially, Microsoft expects to start selling Windows 7 by the end of January 2010, but has said it is possible it could launch earlier.
The company says several New Zealand businesses, including Gen-i and BJ Ball, have already begun testing Windows 7 ahead of starting projects to make the operating system available to staff and, in the case of IT services company Gen-i, its customers.
Gen-i's head of infrastructure and business applications, Leanne Buer, said the new operating system would enhance IT security, streamline technology management and make remote working easier.
Microsoft New Zealand's Windows client business group manager, Ben Green, said input from customers and partners had played an important role in the development of the new version.
"Microsoft really listened to customers when designing Windows 7 and focused on delivering the quality and performance they are looking for," Green said.
Microsoft is counting on Windows 7 to win over businesses that put off upgrading to Vista, the operating system now selling with most PCs, which got off to a rough start because it didn't work well with many existing programs and devices. The software giant also drew criticism from consumers when many computers advertised beforehand as "Vista capable" were actually too weak to run Vista's highly touted new interface and other features.
Users wanting to upgrade Windows XP computers found their graphics cards weren't up to the task.
But with those issues now ironed out, Windows 7 is set for a smoother debut because it shares much of Vista's underlying technology, which means hardware and software makers have had more than two years to catch up to a more demanding set of requirements.
And Microsoft has pushed the notion that the high-end version of Windows 7 will run on many more computers than Vista - including netbooks and low-powered but increasingly popular mini-laptops.
Problems with the performance of Vista on many netbooks mean today Microsoft is still selling Windows XP, its earlier and much less profitable version of its operating system to PC makers to install on netbooks.
"Windows 7 is everything that Vista should have been," said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley.
"It's less annoying and it's a fraction of the size. The only thing working against them is the economy; people without money aren't going to buy no matter how good the product."
Microsoft has added some new features in the release candidate that didn't exist in the earlier "beta" version of Windows 7, including the ability to run Windows XP as a "virtual PC" within the Windows 7 environment.
The release candidate also adds Remote Media Streaming - a way for people to access music and other media files stored on their home PC over the internet from other, trusted, Windows 7 machines.
- AGENCIES
www.microsoft.com/windows7
