Intel Hurting Inside

Hot on the heels of yet another disappointing report on consumer spending comes this report that businesses aren’t buying, either — at least when it comes to computers:

Intel Corp slashed its revenue forecast for the first quarter by nearly $1 billion, saying small and medium businesses did not upgrade from Windows XP operating system as much as the chipmaker had expected.

The world’s largest chipmaker’s shares fell as much as 5.4 percent, dragging down a few other PC-related stocks.

Businesses and consumers were taking an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” attitude to their old PCs, Summit Research analyst Srini Sundararajan said.

I got off my old 30-month upgrade cycle when CPUs hit 2ghz and Windows Vista development stalled. Most business uses don’t require even that much.