Remarkable Intel news!

This may have fitted better in the software section, but the news is so remarkable it justifyes the extra attention it may get here.

Intel is skipping Vista!

-------Intel won't touch Vista

Comment Too broken to deploy

By Charlie Demerjian: Monday, 23 June 2008, 4:08 PM



ACCORDING TO A memo circulating a few weeks ago, it looks like Intel is taking a wise decision and avoiding the Broken OS entirely. Yes, Intel is not going to use Vista on its corporate machines... ever.
When a company as tech savvy as Intel, with full source code access and having written several large chunks of the OS, says get stuffed, you know you have a problem. Well, everyone knows MS has a problem, but it is nice to see it codified in such a black and white way though. Reassuring, like a warm cup of tea, or a public kick to the corporate crown jewels.
The real question is what are they going to use? The official answer is 'nothing yet', the one where they try not to offend is 'likely Windows 7', delivered with a pained smile. Since that is shaping up to be Me II SP1a, I am not sure Intel will bite there either unless they suddenly develop a GPU that can run it in that time frame.
So that leaves two other choices, Linux and Mac. Linux is a distinct possibility, they already have an in-house distro that causes employees look nervously around the room when you talk about it. Although it is not a desktop variant, there is no reason that they could not roll one given two years.
The other one is the big white horse in the corner, Mac OS. If there was ever a company that is loyal to Intel, it is Apple. If there was ever a company that could make MacOS work internally, it is Intel. While any marriage with the turtlenecked sociopath is a match made in hell, don't count this one out either.
In the end, you have Intel flipping MS the bird, and telling them what they already know, Vista in undeployable by anyone with a grain of common sense. The impressive thing is that it just might lead to a waving off of MS entirely, they are the underdog for the next round of upgrades.---------


Now if Intel chooses Linux (and with the recent uprise of Linux, and the fact that they have their own distro this may not be impossible) then this would be the biggest blow to Microsoft ever. I have always been convinced that the only reason that MS went into the console business was to stop Sony from releasing their PS3 with Linux pre installed (the effect of millions of gamers also being able to message, mail, browse and type their reports on a PS3 should never be underestimated). That may have worked since releasing the hardware failure we know as the 360 a lot earlier then expected has forced Sony to stop development in that area and focus on other things, but they underestimated what the EEE pc and the succes of Aplle would do. Vista is the drop that filled the bucket of disgust about MS, and their monopoly may start to fall down harder then one may expect. The concequences for the IT world where many of its employees are windows orientated and could not even install a .tar file in Linux would be devastating btw.

You miss an important point and seeing as you dont work in IT management you would never appreciate how these decisions work.

Intel have not migrated to Vista as they cannot see any ROI for the massive deployment/rollout. The cost out ways any other factor. Intel love Vista, they make an absolute fortune out of people upgrading to multi-core processors and motherboards to use it. Intel have never, ever made as much money as they do at the moment.

They will not regrade (note not upgrade) to linux or apple as the ROI is even less than from rolling out Vista. Linux in a corporate workstation environment is years if not decades off. The cost of training personnel is more than it costs to deploy a Microsoft OS to a PC, let alone the cost of setting up a compatible and competent server infrastructure, i.e. LDAP migration and Domain Policies, etc, etc.

You should take a step back and see it from a corporate POV before posting such utter tripe.

Wether Intel makes as much money by the means of Vista or by abusing their monopoly is questionable. Vista does bring in a lot of money, thats for sure. However, Intel is just like any company, their infrastrucure needs to be stable and as cheap as possible. It management is just there to full fill the needs of upper management and Intel has no shortage of people with the knowledge needed to run Linux or Apple. Who knows how great their distro may even be?

At my job (where IT does whatever the fuck I tell them to do, the arrogant cunts with glasses who think their gods because they can code poorly) we are currently looking at running SAP trough Linux or Windows. Sap functions about the same, so hardly anything changes for the end user.

I may have accepted a job at the government btw, those weak people (the government in general attracts the people who simply arent cut out to work at big companys with time pressure) wiil not know what hit them till the Gazzer comes along.

Edit: never realised SAP was so freaking big, its one of the biggest software companys worldwide. I reall never knew before although I always wondered how they could afford to sponsor Ferrari in F1

NONSENSE. Intel just sold 80% of their comp to AMD

Are you trying to tell me that deploying thin clients, SAP and virtualising the entire infrastructure is cheaper than upgrading to Vista? You are trying to argue the point with someone who makes these decisions for a living! Intel make their money by offering the best solution. Sure they are heavy handed, but so are nearly every no1 player in their respective industries.

Sure, its more than a viable option for most companies to consider a unix/linux backbone, but to assume Intel doesn't use a Terminal Services or Citrix type solution is ludicrous! They are probably all ready running Server 2008, SQL 2008, Exchange 2008. All they are considering is whether to migrate the end-users to Vista. Why on earth would they want to deploy and AppleOS or LinuxOS when the cost of doing so would be massive and the personnel training costs would be through the roof!

It also makes me laugh when people say there is a surge in the use of linux. Linux has not made a dent in mainstream IT for years. Most IT departments and IT decision makers scoff at the idea of deploying it to the end-users. The only way it creeps into the corporate environment is because they make cheap print, fax, database or web servers. Modern IT infrastructure needs to be able to control the use of a Win32 client at the end point, because Windows 2000, XP and Vista are the 95%+ majority. Linux has no way of controlling that environment so will inevitably leave them open. Have you ever tried setting up a linux equivalent to Windows 2003/2008?

No you haven't and I bet you will struggle to find anyone who can argue the point.

Of course I love Linux on my home PC. I have used Linux for 8 years. I get to hide all my child porn and warez on it, however it is an absolute no go in a corporate environment.

Originally Posted by GMtm

Of course I love Linux on my home PC. I have used Linux for 8 years. I get to hide all my child porn and warez on it, however it is an absolute no go in a corporate environment.

That is actually going to change GM. Yes, I know it sounds weird, but it is happening. It has been confirmed by some literature I had to read for my study. Of course it has serious disadvantages, and it is not always that much of use compared to MS's equivalents. Yet, the advantages are (in many cases) for example cost savings (necessary hardware, maintanance) and higher processing power (pointing to the fact that Windows draws comparatively much system resources).

Source: O' Brien, J. & Markas, G. (2007). Enterprise Information Systems, International Edition pp. 128-129, 133. McGraw-Hill.

Whatever you post or refer from I can find something to counter it. I attend seminars and industry events and all that is good and discussed is the further integration of Microsoft into business. No home-brew fanboy software is going to compete with such a force in the foreseeable future. The only company that has any chance is novell/SuSe, literally because of their prior experience with novell netware. However the problem you have is not just the backend, but supporting the endpoints and until they are 95%+ non windows machines IT Managers throughout the World will not accept them into their network infrastructures. Give it 10 years and maybe China can come up with something, but until that time M$ are too integrated into business now.

M$ are no1 for a reason. At some point in past (NT4.0 era) they delivered an architecture that pulled corporate IT administration away from an elitest group and made it available to people of all ages all around the World. They did not employ heavy-handed tactics to get rid of OS2, Netware, HPUnix and the rest. People saw it as a more viable, easily obtainable and supportable product. You could purchase a PC off the shelf and have it running a fully functioning Server OS without the need to buy a supercomputer from Compaq or Sun aswell as the ubiquitous support contract. Since NT4.0 Windows 2000 Server, Exchange and SQL have grown into amazing products that literally blow the nix variants out of the market. Sure you might be able to install a linux mail server on a 486, but it doesn't nestle so easily into your LDAP, DNS, SQL and Backup Servers. You probably wont be able to administer it within 2 clicks of a mouse and I can guarantee it will be a bitch to support if it falls over. If you think otherwise then pop over to see my latest server room and I will show you how easy it is to support 290,000k end points, including servers, workstations, printers, network, backup, web servers, etc, etc, from 3 continents from one admin console.

Now I am all up for a bit of competition, because it will reduce M$'s licenses fees, but it is at least a decade off. Linux distros have to gang together to make their numbers mean anything in comparison to M$'s efforts over the last 10 years. On their own they don't hold up at all. Redhat and SuSe are the two biggest players and whilst they do offer some excellent solutions in bespoke applications (and I have some) they don't hold up to offer a complete solution.

Microsoft turnover a billon dollars a day! Until a linux distro can do that then I know who I am backing. I am quite happy that you are content with your little 3d spinning GUI cubes in Gnome or KDE and are leaving people like me to earn good money with proven IT infrastructures. I will retire early and move to my quite village in Italy whilst all the linux fanboys argue with my children about how KDE v26 has spinning sparkly crapola and is free so its amazing!

Just a comment on the OP..

Major users skipping OS generations isn't really anything surprising. Some of the major US government agencies have also announced that they will take a pass on Vista (as I recall, they cited that "there is no compelling business reason to upgrade") and my company (Hewlett Packard) recently replaced my laptop with a shiny new model sporting vista.... then applied the corporate image which was XP

I also happen to know for a fact that another Fortune 500 company still runs Server 2003 SP1 (They haven't even gotten around to SP2 yet, forget R2) and have no immediate plans to change that.

Sorry Gazz, while MS certainly isn't happy about it, its not anything new, and they won't really feel it.

Intel and all the other non-adopters will just wait out Vista and see what the next OS offering is.

Hi Bucky nice to see you online!

It certainly isn't anything new and its not a choice because Vista is broken, there just isn't a need for it in a corporate/enterprise environment. If you have a nice home PC/Family PC then I still consider it an absolute must. I don't have a roadmap for vista. All our new XPS laptops and CAD stations arrive with Vista, so I created a policy for those, but all the other machines will be upgraded to the next OS when the hardware is under spec.

Anyway, Linux or not, a company using Vista is not really clever. Because to upgrade their Win NT/2000/XP stuff into Vista, would mean they have to buy new hardware too. And that's not quite a matter of 512MB of RAM, a single-core CPU and onboard graphics. At least, onboard graphics for the GUI combined with stuff like multimonitors (which are necessary in some cases) won't work.
And let's not forget that Vista's design is not aimed at a working environment. Myself, I have quite a good multimedia experience with it, but that is not a "plus" being relevant for an office. MS either knew beforehand that it wouldn't reach that much bussiness users, or made a major design mistake (probably it is the latter).