[Infowarrior] - Intel wont Won’t Embrace Microsoft’s Windows Vista

[Richard Forno]

Et Tu, Intel? Chip Giant Won’t Embrace Microsoft’s Windows Vista

By Steve Lohr

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/et-tu-intel/index.html?hp

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.

“This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information  
technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,”  
the person said.

An Intel spokesman said the company was testing and deploying Vista  
in certain departments, but not across the company.

Intel’s decision is certain to sting Microsoft because the two  
companies have worked closely to align hardware and software from the  
earliest days of the personal computer. Indeed, the corporate duo is  
known as “Wintel” in the PC industry.

Could Intel change its mind? Quite possibly. Microsoft’s chief  
executive, Steven Ballmer, has few equals as a forceful, persuasive  
salesman, and he and Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive, meet  
regularly.

Word of Intel’s lukewarm response to Vista appeared Monday in The  
Inquirer, an irreverent London-based technology Web site.

Intel is hardly alone in its reluctance to embrace Microsoft’s latest  
operating system, which was available to corporate customers in  
November 2006 and to consumers in January 2007. Large companies  
routinely hold off a year or so after a new version of Windows is  
introduced before adopting it, waiting for initial bugs to be  
eliminated and for applications to be written. “But by 18 months,  
you’d expect to see a significant uptake, and we haven’t seen that,”  
said David Smith, a Gartner analyst. “There’s not much excitement.”

His Gartner colleague, Michael Silver, said that about 30 percent of  
corporate customers skip any given new version of Windows. But the  
percentage will be higher for Vista, Mr. Silver predicted. Gartner’s  
corporate clients that plan to skip Vista, like Intel, do not see  
value of this upgrade, particularly since it requires new PC hardware  
at the time when the economy is weak and corporate budgets are tight.

Still, Microsoft doesn’t seem to be suffering too much from the  
resistance to Vista by some large corporations. Microsoft says there  
are more than 140 million copies of Vista installed on machines  
worldwide. Consumers and small businesses simply get the operating  
system that is on a new machine when they buy a PC, and that is Vista.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft operating system engine chugs on, phasing  
out the old and proclaiming the new. The company reiterated this week  
that, despite some customer protests, it would halt shipments of the  
previous version of Windows, XP, to retail stores and stop most  
licensing of XP to PC makers next week. Microsoft also announced that  
the next version of its operating system, Windows 7, is scheduled to  
go on sale in January 2010.