Filed under: Business, News, Windows, Microsoft
Intel to Vista: "I'm just not that into you."
by Christina Warren Jun 26th 2008 at 11:30AM
Windows 7 cannot come fast enough! The New York Times is reporting that Intel has decided against upgrading its 80,000 employees to Windows Vista. An Intel spokesperson told the Times that Vista is being tested and deployed in certain departments, but not company-wide.Although the enterprise push to upgrade to Vista has fallen short of expectations, this is a particularly brutal blow. Intel is one of Microsoft's oldest and most important partners; both companies became industry leaders in large part because of that partnership.
Although the Times' Intel source made efforts to say that the decision wasn't about "dissing Microsoft," we doubt that will make Steve Ballmer feel any better. Can you imagine what that conversation is going to sound like?
Despite the lack of widespread corporate adoption, the install base for Windows Vista is 140 million worldwide -- hardly peanuts. Still, with large corporations declining to upgrade their systems, Microsoft has had to extend support for Windows XP through 2014.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
TurboFool said 11:43AM on 6-26-2008
Well, it's not like it affects Microsoft financially. Companies like Intel don't pay per-unit, or even per-version prices. They pay an annual subscription fee to have Enterprise VLK copies of every current piece of MS software available to them. Microsoft is collecting that annual fee regardless of whether Intel uses Vista, XP, or 2000 on its workstations. The only effect it has is the backlash that articles like this cause in further supporting the public perception that Vista is anything less than a strong, stable, well-designed operating system that merely suffers from the same problems every version of Windows has when it was brand new.
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Rawker said 1:43PM on 6-26-2008
well said
at this point vista runs way better than xp
do people actually remember when xp first came out?
Todd said 12:35PM on 6-26-2008
"...Intel has decided against upgrading its 80,000 employees to Windows Vista.."
Oh snap!
O can imagine the email that went out a few or two ago..."From William Gates, To Intel...Please wait until after I retire to announce you are refusing to upgrade to Vista...KTHXBAI, Bill..."
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joey said 12:47PM on 6-26-2008
Wasnt Intel the one that asked Microsoft to do that whole Vista Capable thing so they could sell more 915GMA?
Microsoft hooks up a long time partner then they do this. Man that's just messed up.
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Votre said 2:31PM on 6-26-2008
First the corporate IT departments rebelled and said no. Then they started looking seriously at Linux. And Microsoft heard what they said and came up with a "solution" to the dilemma - a downgrade option.
What I really love is how Microsoft did a little hocus-pocus by allowing Vista users to "downgrade" their Vista license to install a copy of XP!
Now they no longer have the embarrassment of XP outselling Vista since all new XP licenses are now Vista sales (even if the aren't)!
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Frank Black said 8:43PM on 7-01-2008
>the install base for Windows Vista is 140 million worldwide
>-- hardly peanuts.
Hardly peanuts? More like misleading. This reminds me of Henry Ford's quote, "You can have any color as long as it is black." Seriously, how can Microsoft quote that 140 million installation number with a straight face. People wanted a computer, not Vista. They just happened to get Vista when they bought the new computer. People don't know any better, so they take what they are told they should take. The number means nothing. The world (especially the tech savvy world) has spoken: Vista = Fail. No, not "Epic Fail", but fail for simply charging a lot for pretty much nothing. I'm with Intel... Windows 7 can't come soon enough.
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DT Smith said 9:06PM on 7-02-2008
I'm still not sold on Vista. Yeah sure, it's got some better features, but it still needs some hefty hardware to run it and run it well. My company is not willing to spend lots of money to upgrade our hardware so we can go to Vista. The only time we buy new hardware is if we're out and have new users coming in. We have tested Vista using this new hardware but we still experience compatibility issues. Our latest issue is with Dell D630 laptops with Intel video cards. We experience random BSODs. Luckily we only have a few of these. We have a couple D630s with nVidia video cards and those don't seem to have that problem. But those also have built in verizon cards that have problems. It's weird issues like these that keep us from going to Vista. We continue to test but we always come back to XP. Hopefully Windows 7 will be better. Although we probably won't be jumping on that anytime soon.
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