Intel chooses to stick with XP?

Seriously why should they? For home users the switch to Vista is a minor inconvenience and the cost of the product - you learn to use it pretty quickly by playing around with the system. For business customers there is the cost of the product, but the much more expensive cost in loss of staff productivity for the transition period and the humongous cost in IT for the aftermath and physical switchover timeframe.

Beyond all of this you have the testing that's going to have to happen for all of Intel's internal software and so on, and in the end, is Vista worth it? Probably not.

Given that Intel are currently on XP, I think that they would be well advised to switch over to Windows 7 when it is released, jumping over Vista, not because Vista is a problem, but simply the act of switching is punishingly expensive

That is a massive underestimate.

Let us suppose that Intel are big enough to push Microsoft to only $150 a licence.
Let us suppose that some hypothetical worker Bill works for Intel and is in all aspects average.
To put things in perspective I hire my time out on cost sheets at $200 an hour, (although I get paid in reality much less than half that) - this $200 includes company tax, income tax, the cost of my desk, experience, training, the office, staff, the coffee machine, the parking lot etc.

So Bill is going to be incapacitated for 2-4 hours while his laptop is out of service during the install. Although you can argue that he can just hand it in to IT and expect it back tommorrow all sorted, this never happens in practise, and you end up having to make sure that your files are all backed up and that IT don't do stupid things, so you lose 2-4 hours.

Once this is done it's pretty much a given that the rest of the day will be lost as the network floods with updates and complaints and getting your favourite screensaver/background/browser/settings/window colour "just right" as well as waiting for the ubiquitous black boxes of doom that make sure that "Home | BBC.com - Microsoft Internet Explorer" becomes "Home | BBC.com - Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by Intel Corporation" gets set up and ActiveX disappears and so on.

So a day into the process we've lost a day. Let's be concervative and say that you're up and running perfectly by the end of the day and you've only lost 5 hours to the whole process and a further ten hours of working at half capacity. That's 10 hours (or $2000) lost.

Now let's factor in the fact that I'm not installing it myself. Some poor IT guy is spending two hours of his time making sure that my documents are back and that vista installed and configuring the licence server and the updates and testing the programs work and fixing the problems afterwards. That's not to say it takes him 2 hours per machine. It's probably half an hour each (factoring in logistics) plus a constant 200 hour effort between the twenty guys in IT before the update and a further 500 hours afterwards (that's still 44,000 manhours).

And just incase I've been unfair (which maybe I have), I'm going to subtract a constant factor of 50% just to make sure this is an underestimate. So per installation we're at

Cost to IT in installing = 2 manhours = $300
Cost to Bill in lost productivity = 10 manhours = $1,500
Cost of Windows itself = $150

= $1,950 per person.
= $156 million (real cost) to Intel for upgrade of which $12m is cash to Microsoft.


So ask yourself whether purchasing Windows Vista will save Intel $150million, because if it won't, it's a net cost to upgrade and good business sense says not to.