Microsoft, it seems, is taking a beating from all sides over its much maligned Windows Vista operating system. Long-time partners Intel, according to an inside source who spoke to the New York Times, have not yet made the switch to Vista on its employees computers. The decision was apparently made after in-depth analysis of costs and benefits by Intel engineers.

This is not good news for Microsoft, amid slow acceptance of the OS by corporate and personal PC users. Vista requires significant hardware upgrades to run smoothly and uses much more of your systems resources than previous versions such as Windows XP.

With a relationship dating back decades, Wintel – as they are sometimes known – maintain that any rift with Microsoft, implied by recent reports has been blown out of proportion, and that no absolute decisions have been made about the software.

Kari Aakre, a spokesperson for Intel, “There are some misperceptions out there. Vista is being tested and used in certain departments - just not company-wide at this point.”

“Windows is by far the dominant OS for the bulk of our 80,000 employees,” Aakre explained. “Our IT department is constantly refreshing employee desktops and laptops, and there are a number of different factors that are considered before we chose the actual type of software for the computer.”

So far there has been no final conclusion as to whether the company will roll out Vista to all its employees. “It’s not something we would typically announce,” she said.

The fact that Intel hasn’t upgraded many of its systems more than a year after Vista’s release is leading to loads speculation in the industry.

“I would file a story like this under corporate irony,” Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-It said. “The whole ‘Wintel’ platform idea is something people are so used to that when the company’s part ways on positions having to do with their own autonomous business practices, it’s a little surprising to see them diverge.”

But why is Intel so hesitant to fully adopt the software?

“I have to think Intel doesn’t do anything without going through a lot of analysis,” Bruce Clark, associate professor of marketing at Northeastern University College of Business Administration, said.

“They must have had a fairly strong case from their internal IT group to say that they should delay - and I would have to think somebody in senior management had to sign off on that decision, because this was obviously something that was going to have to hit the press in a big way,” he pointed out.

The reason is likely to do with the sate of the US economy and the cost of upgrading. It doesn’t take much to realise upgrading in not going to be cheap.

“I can’t think of another Microsoft product that has required such a significant hardware upgrade in order to minimize problems with the operating system,” King said.

“We’ve been drifting along the edge of a recession for the last 12 or 18 months, so buying new computers is the last thing on many consumers’ and many businesses’ minds. Businesses in particular are more focused on getting by with what they have than buying the latest and greatest,” he said.

Users have had to decide whether the costs outweigh the benefits, and at this point the maths just doesn’t add up.

“For a major, major upgrade, the beneficial payback has not been so overwhelming that companies have been willing to embrace it, given the other costs involved,” King observed.

The next telling factor will be what happens when Windows 7 is released, since Microsoft has indicated an upgrade will be available only for Vista systems.

“It creates a really interesting scenario. From Microsoft’s standpoint, doing everything they can to encourage businesses and consumers to move to Vista is obviously the strategy they want to pursue. At the same time, you can’t make people buy something that they don’t want,” King noted.

“If the barriers to adopting Windows 7 are severe, in the worst-case scenarios, customers could start looking at alternative OS’s. I don’t think that’s a scenario that Microsoft will want to encourage,” he said.