You might think it’s only the small- to mid-size businesses that are dragging their heels about making the OS switch to Vista. But you’d be wrong.

The Powerhouse chipmaker Intel is also taking a pass — a permanent pass — on Microsoft’s unpopular and much-maligned new operating system.

The New York Times is reporting someone who’s been briefed on the situation — but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, — said Intel made its decision after a long look by its internal technology staff at the costs and future benefits of moving to Windows Vista.

Intel isn’t the first big Microsoft customer to turn up its nose at Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that demands expensive hardware upgrades if it’s going 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 source told the Times.

An Intel spokesman said the company — like many that use Microsoft products — was testing and deploying Vista in certain departments, but not across the company.

Intel’s decision is certain to leave Microsoft red-faced and smarting, because the two companies have worked closely to align hardware and software from the earliest days of the personal computer. To some in the PC industry, the Intel-Microsoft marriage is known as “Wintel”.

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

Intel isn’t alone in spurning Microsoft’s latest operating system, launched to businesses in late 2006 and to consumers in early 2007. And it isn’t unusual for a big — or small — operation to take its time evaluating a new OS and planning the upgrade.

“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.”

Gartner experts say about 30 percent of corporate customers will skip any given new version of Windows. But these same experts are predicting the percentage will be higher for Vista for a couple of reasons:

• Vista will, in most cases, demand a costly hardware and software upgrade, and
• the economy’s weak and corporate budgets are tight.

Although Microsoft keeps insisting Vista’s a hit because it’s unloaded 140 million copies, their boasts ring a bit hollow to most who live in the IT world. They know that you simply get the OS that’s on a new machine when you buy it, and these days that system is Vista.

With downgrade rights to XP still possible, many folks are still using the reliable old XP and shunning Vista even though they’ve got a copy sitting around waiting to be deployed.

So what’s on the horizon? Microsoft is still insisting that it’ll halt shipments of Windows XP to retail stores and stop most licensing of XP to PC makers June 30, 2008. And they’re saying the next version of its operating system, Windows 7, is scheduled to go on sale in January 2010.

Of course, Microsoft never met a deadline it couldn’t bust, so don’t be holding your breath.

Tags: Intel, Microsoft, migrate, OS, switch, Vista