No Vista Inside for Intel

By Davey Winder
Thursday, 26 June 2008 16:56

Technology

Upgrade to Windows Vista? No thanks, says Intel according to an insider. The chip giant apparently has no plans to upgrade 80,000 employees from XP to Vista, in what must be a painful blow to Microsoft.

Speaking to the New York Times an Intel insider, who remains anonymous in print but is said to have direct knowledge of company strategy, has said the chip giant will skip Vista.

The reason being perhaps the most hurtful to Microsoft: "no compelling case."

That has to be something of a blow to Microsoft considering that they once said businesses would embrace it twice as quickly as they did XP. Here's what Brad Goldberg, general manager for Windows product management, said in September 2006 :

"Vista is built for businesses. We're giving businesses the tools they need to get out of the gate faster with Vista. Our goal is to have twice as fast deployment of Vista than for any other operating system."

How wrong could he have been?

The New York Times says that, according to the Intel insider, the company has 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."

Intel, meanwhile, claims that it is currently both testing and deploying Vista. But only in selected departments, not enterprise wide. In itself this has to come as a surprise from the company that is still known in many circles as Wintel thanks to the closeness it has shared with Microsoft in the past.

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