Its managing director Butt Wai Choon noted that the public sector is quite sizable, and cited several reasons why Windows XP would be seen as desirable.
"Stronger security features, plus better workflow managability, as well as the ability to deploy support applications remotely are all key factors when it comes to government departments," he said.
In fact, government-backed organizations like SIRIM Berhad, Gas Malaysia, Inland Revenue Board all started deploying Windows XP before the official launch today.
Butt also expects a good uptake of Windows XP from local enterprises, even though he concedes that Windows 2000 users may not see the need to purchase the latest Microsoft offering.
"But a large portion of local enterprise users are not on Windows 2000 as yet," he told a press conference at the operating systems'launch on Thursday. "These companies will get the biggest benefits from Windows XP."
Despite the sluggish economic outlook, Butt believes Windows XP offers the competitive edge that companies are looking for to stay sharp in business, so much so that they would be willing to make the necessary IT-related investments.
According to a eTesting Labs study quoted by Microsoft, Windows XP scored 36 percent higher than Windows 98 SE, and 40 percent higher than Windows ME.
"That's a tremendous leap and we are confident of Windows XP's success, given the lightning-speed computing needs of users worldwide," Microsoft Malaysia's director for central market organization Alex Fong added.
"It (XP) also unifies a number of communications tools," he said, allowing users to participate in text chat, voice and video communications and data collaboration."
Asked about a recent Gartner comment that Windows XP does not offer any significant increase in value to the customer, Fong replied that "analysts have different ways of looking at things," and asserted that Microsoft was unperturbed.
"What is important is that customers in Malaysia are beginning to look at the value that we are offering, and obviously we are going to build on that."
Butt said that Microsoft was expecting 100 million current Windows users to upgrade to Windows XP within the next 12 months. There are 400 million users in the world now.
Piracy
However, the issue of software piracy continues to dog Microsoft. When asked about the pirated copies of Windows XP flooding the market, Butt said Malaysia is fast becoming a hub for producing counterfeit products.
That illegal copies of Windows XP can be gotten for as low as RM5 (US$1.32) in the city indicates the level of sophistication on the part of pirates, to get the product "to market" way before Microsoft.
"Software piracy harms the country in a variety of ways, through the undermining of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) and lack of incentive for Malaysians to write their own intellectual property--knowing it would most likely be copied anyway," he said.
A Business Software Alliance (BSA) report indicated that last year, the software industry lost an estimated RM363.3 million (US$95.6 million) due to rampant software piracy.
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