Two news items caught my eye today – Intel’s earnings report (yes, the results were terrible) and a piece at internetnews.com with the title “Survey: 83% of IT Shops Will Skip Vista”. Intel’s Paul Otellini says in their release that “We believe PC sales bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns”. Given the economy and Vista together, it’s easy to see how seasonal patterns might return, but only at a far lower level of sales. Intel’s margins are deteriorating, and they really can’t handle a lower sales volume for long without um, taking some action.
Intel is not really to blame for this state of affairs – Microsoft is. Vista is an abject failure, a new high-water mark for arrogance and/or stupidity. Let’s face it, no one really cares if their processor is made by Intel, AMD, or Matsumura Fishworks and Tamaribuchi Heavy Manufacturing Concern (one of the best Simpsons episodes ever, IMHO). What customers really buy are applications (including most notably the buggy and slow Microsoft Office), but those won’t run without a layer of code (the OS) between the unreasonable world of computer hardware and, again, what we really buy computers for. And Vista just gums up the works – stronger language is really required here, but this is a family blog.
Windows 7, AKA Vista SP3, the pre-pre-announced replacement for Vista, is receiving good reviews from early testers, and it definitely looks like an improvement over Vista. Sure it’s still frustratingly complex and still has such nonsense as the Registry (don’t edit this unless you want to risk your machine not booting, but you must edit it to get your machine to work properly, and oh, my, who designs junk like this?), but it’s likely going to be better than Vista regardless. And yet the internetnews.com piece reports that “82 percent of IT decision makers will wait at least a year after Windows 7 ships before beginning deployments”. That’s good strategy regardless in my book; unfortunately, it also means that Intel can expect a long dry spell before hardware breakdowns, if nothing else, force the replacement of trusty (hey, compared to Vista it is indeed!) XP machines.
My advice remains as before: look into the Mac and Ubuntu. The Mac is more expensive to acquire, but (I can’t prove this yet) less expensive to own than the PC. It’s easier to use and manage than a PC, even though it, too, has assorted UI problems (I actually like XP better in this department). Ubuntu is free, but support may be an issue for many for now. Both of these communities will regardless prosper at the expense of Microsoft, and Intel ultimately doesn’t care what OS runs on its processors. But we’re nonetheless still a long way from an uptick in this traditional bastion of high tech. In the meantime, help the economy and buy yourself a MID – you just might find you don’t need a regular PC at all.
