KEY POINTS:
Wellington businessman Shaan Stevens was at Beijing airport, about to board a flight to Mongolia, when the scammer struck.
An official-looking man told Stevens and other passengers the plane was too full so they would have to hand over their laptops, which would be stored in a special
compartment.
His instincts blunted by jetlag, Stevens complied. Once on board, a query to the flight attendant about where his laptop would be stored drew a blank response and the horrible realisation that he had been robbed of the machine and the priceless cache of data it contained.
Stories like this must filter back to Microsoft every day. Growing concerns about data security have prompted the company to highlight the BitLocker Drive Encryption system as one selling point for high-end versions of its new Vista operating system.
Stevens is a happy convert. "Now I can lose my laptops with gay abandon," he joked this week.
An executive director of consultancy firm Guinness Gallagher, he uses Vista as the hub of the entertainment and business systems he runs throughout his home. His vociferous support for Vista and the Office 2007 suite, both launched this week, was PR gold for Microsoft New Zealand.
It is grappling with the same marketing issue as the software giant's other subsidiaries around the world: how to sell the new products in a market which is generally happy with the functionality of existing systems.
For business customers, the answer is to sell them on the software's security and productivity features.
Microsoft NZ managing director Helen Robinson focused on the latter at Tuesday's launch, saying the new products were "about the Kiwi lifestyle [and answering the question] how do we integrate that work-life balance that we're all striving for?"
Numerous users, Stevens included, say Vista and Office 2007 are making their working days more productive. But for businesses the question is whether those gains are worth the effort of rushing to buy the new software.
Most won't, but will simply upgrade over the next few years as part of their regular technology replacement cycle.
Research group Gartner predicts Vista's market share will reach just 12.3 per cent this year, against 77.1 per cent for its five-year-old predecessor, Microsoft XP.
It will not be until 2009 that Vista establishes itself as the world's dominant operating system, by which time Gartner estimates it will have 55.4 per cent of the market, compared with XP's 40 per cent.
Corporate IT departments have learned (often from painful first-hand experience) that it is best to wait for early bugs to be ironed out of a system before deploying it, and that waiting period is typically 12 months.
But one company taking a less cautious approach is the local professional services consultancy Beca Group, which has successfully trialled Vista on 32 machines and plans to upgrade all of its 1350 desktop PCs and 450 laptops.
Beca had been running the ageing Windows 2000 operating system and decided to skip XP in favour of Vista because of the security and desktop management tools it offered, said chief information officer Robin Johansen. He said the decision was not taken lightly.
"We were persuaded that the development at that point was looking pretty good, and so it's proven, it's not been hugely disruptive.
"The main emphasis [has been] ... on testing the applications software that will run on Vista."
Microsoft's biggest local Vista convert to date is Telecom, which expects to have about 500 staff using the new operating system, plus Office 2007, by March.
Telecom has an added incentive to switch over. Its technology subsidiary Gen-i will be a consultant to other businesses making the switch.