Intel says no to Vista

This has got to hurt. From the NY Times comes this interesting anecdote: Intel has decided not to upgrade employee PCs to Microsoft Vista.

Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said.

The person, who has been briefed on the situation but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, said the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly.

Earlier this month, at Computer Economics, we reported findings from our annual study of technology trends, which indicate that Intel is not alone in its decision to say no to Vista. We found that most organizations are still not including Vista in their plans for 2008. In fact, there were not even enough early adopters to provide a large enough sample for an ROI/TCO analysis.

Microsoft's misstep with Vista is unlikely to boost very much the desktop share of competing operating systems, such as Linux or Apple's OS/X. Most organization's staying on XP will eventually upgrade to Vista, or wait for Microsoft's next generation of desktop OS, Windows 7, scheduled for release in 2010.