Windows Vista? Businesses say "no thanks"

Don't care for Microsoft's bloated new operating system? You're not alone, and in fact, it's not just consumers who are giving Vista the cold shoulder. Large enterprises, including General Motors, are considering bypassing the operating system altogether and simply waiting for Windows 7, Microsoft's eventual successor to Vista.

GM, for now, says that bypassing Vista is still a "maybe." Its big complaint is that Vista's CPU and RAM requirements are just too crushing.

For a company that, by my reckoning, could have hundreds of thousands of desktops in operation, replacing everyone's computer just so they can run Vista is simply out of the question. With XP still working fine, there's really no way to justify the massive expense and general upheaval of such a move.

As BusinessWeek notes, Microsoft has more than just its own old OS to worry about, as budget-crunched IT managers look to web freebies (like OpenOffice.org) and even Macintosh PCs as alternatives to Vista. Macs may cost more, but they're probably not much more expensive or intrusive than switching from XP to Vista.

Resistance is likely to continue: Last quarter, 65 percent of Microsoft's OS sales were Vista. The other 35 percent were XP. Microsoft had hoped that would be an 80 percent/20 percent split instead, reflecting the fact that consumers and companies like GM are really digging in their heels.

Things should really get interesting after June 30, when XP officially goes off the market. Is resistance futile? We'll see.