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Is the Vista fiasco bad enough to hurt Microsoft (MSFT)?

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We've known for a long time that Vista has been aggravating Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) customers, both personal and corporate. More than 200,000 aggrieved customers have signed InfoWorld's Save XP petition to keep selling the old operating system past its current deadline of June 30. BusinessWeek reports today that Wall Street is increasingly concerned that Vista may even hurt Microsoft's bottom line.

It would take an issue of monumental proportions to move a behemoth like Microsoft. Could Vista be that bad? BusinessWeek's Aaron Ricadela cites a Sanford Bernstein report by Charles Di Bona estimating that Vista will clip Microsoft earnings by $395 million or 2 cents a share for FY2009. That's a lot of money, but Microsoft has earnings of over $14 billion.

The issue is that businesses are becoming wary of all the problems they've heard about (memory hogging, incompatibility with software and hardware, pestering prompts, propensity for crashes). So they're increasingly deciding to stick it out and wait for the next operating system, Vista 7, which won't be out until 2010 or 2011 (and then, like Vista, may take time to work out the kinks). Bernstein did a survey and found that only about a quarter of IT pros expect to be using Vista by 2011, down from about two-thirds a year ago.

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Last updated: November 28, 2009: 08:08 AM

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