That's the word on the street at the moment, at least. Just when I was looking for some major company to demonstrate the viability of skipping Vista (as I have been suggesting) despite the discontinuation of XP later this month, along comes a leaked memo and a secret source detailing Intel's plans to do just that.

I'm not going to go bananas over this, although I'm not sure the blogosphere will join me in my sobriety; in fact, it doesn't indicate anything other than what I have been saying all along, which isn't that Vista is the devil, but simply that it doesn't offer benefits commensurate with the costs of upgrading. That Intel appears to be (so far; I'm sure the big sales guns in Redmond will be turning that direction with this revelation) listening to the internal team that generated this analysis is the only thing that separates it from other companies which are upgrading more out of tradition or fear. I expect very few enterprises which have bothered to analyze the upgrade have been able to cost-justify it.

At the same time, this does also tend to indicate a diminishment of Microsoft's authority in the enterprise desktop space. There was a time when it would have been unthinkable for such a close partner to disregard such an offering. A delay in deployment is one thing; skipping the product entirely is something else. That Intel appears to be doing so now doesn't exactly signal the end-times from Microsoft, but it's another Wedge driven in a widening crack that Redmond is sure to rue eventually.