Vendors insist PC sales will survive Vista delay

PC vendors were putting on a brave face Wednesday in the wake of news from Microsoft Corp. that the consumer version of the Windows Vista operating system would not ship in time for pre-loaded machines to reach retail shelves in time for this year’s holiday shopping boom.

Microsoft has pushed back the release to January of next year, Microsoft Co-President of the Platform and Services Division Jim Allchin said Tuesday.

Allchin would not give specific reasons for Vista’s delay, but said Microsoft’s business partners had requested the delay after learning of a quality issue. They preferred a clear January date for release, instead of a rush to allow them to ship Vista on hardware by late November.

Microsoft, of Redmond, Washington, still plans to release Vista to business partners in November 2006.

The delay could put a big dent in late-December holiday sales, industry analysts said.

“It’s going to impact retailers, chip manufacturers, and computer manufacturers,” said Sam Bhavnani, principal analyst with Current Analysis Inc., an industry research firm in San Diego, California. “It’s really going to hurt consumer-focused PC makers. If you’re a PC maker and you have all your eggs in the consumer market, your sales over the holiday season are likely to be less than you expected.”

Bhavnani said the amount of mainstream media attention given to Windows Vista has created consumer awareness around the operating system.

“If there’s a $299 machine advertised at BestBuy they’re going to sell as many of those as they would anyway without Vista, but if you’re a more mainstream or higher-end buyer you might not want to drop money on a system that does not have Vista, knowing it will come out in a couple weeks.”

But computer vendors insisted they could ride out the storm.

The delay will have “no material affect” on Hewlett-Packard Co.’s holiday PC sales, said company spokeswoman Tiffany Smith, in Palo Alto, California.

“Microsoft is one of our most valuable and trusted partners, and we support them in determining the most appropriate schedule for their own launch. We are working together to ensure that what we deliver to customers is the best technology when it’s ready,” Smith said.

Other vendors said they would rely on sales of the business version of Vista, since the delay affects only the consumer version.

“Nobody here is really worried about it,” since sales from the business sector could make up for any shortfall on the consumer side, said Stefanie Schusser, a spokeswoman for Fujitsu-Siemens Computers GmbH.

In fact, the consumer shortfall may never happen. She doesn’t expect that most customers will decide against buying a PC for Christmas just because Vista isn’t on it. Also, people who may have been interested in buying a computer with Vista for the end of the year holiday season may just instead buy gift certificates, picking up the actual product a few months later when Vista is available, she said.

Likewise, a spokesman for Gateway Inc., in Irvine, California, said his company works hand-in-hand with Microsoft daily, so they had expected the announcement. Gateway plans to sell many of its computers as “Vista-ready” so holiday buyers will still be able to buy the hardware in 2006, then upgrade their OS from Windows XP to Vista in 2007, said Steve Bulling, product manager for professional products.

Still, analysts insisted that vendors’ optimism was merely the start of a marketing push to make up for lost sales.

Even if the PC manufacturers do think the Vista delay will impact sales, they wouldn’t admit it, said David Bradshaw, principal analyst at research firm Ovum Ltd. “It would be bad business to say this is a big deal because it would stop people from buying PCs now,” he said. He expects that PC makers will lose a significant amount of sales because of the Vista delay and he considers it very uncertain that they’ll be able to recoup the lost sales after the holiday season.

One consumer said he thinks the delay could potentially impact holiday spending.

“I would definitely delay it to check out Vista,” said Dan Voss, in Dulles, Virgina. “I actually haven’t paid much attention to what’s new with Vista, but I’d wait because I’d want the latest and greatest.”

On Wednesday, Standard & Poor’s reiterated its “strong buy” recommendation for Microsoft stock, the price of which fell yesterday on the news.

“We expect the slippage of the consumer version to push some sales from the ’06 holiday season into early ’07, but we do not expect the change to materially impact annual results,” said S&P Software Analyst Gary McDaniel.

Elizabeth Montalbano in San Francisco contributed to this story.