Don't Base Vista's Future on the Past

It's a battlefield out there, but the bears seem to have gained the upper hand. Gold is strong again today, but not so for the oil stocks. Semiconductors are actually up fractionally on the day, continuing their "flipping it" action as they've been down on most rally days.

I've gotten several emails today from people "giving me the heads-up" that Vista's reception is doomed. There are still few believers in Microsoft (MSFT - commentary - Cramer's Take).

IBM (IBM - commentary - Cramer's Take) made an interesting announcement regarding this in a note this morning:

"To gain traction in the market for easy and quick adoption by both corporate and consumer users, IBM will announce on November 30 new provisioning software that will help accelerate the deployment time for Microsoft Vista customers. According to an internal IBM study, the software is estimated to help an enterprise with 100 PCs deploy or upgrade an operating system in just under one hour.

Installing and configuring an operating system on a single computer can take some IT managers more than two hours. The Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Operating System Deployment, based on technology from IBM's acquisition of Rembo, can help organizations automatically install or upgrade operating systems such as Microsoft's Vista on thousands of servers, laptops and desktop computers simultaneously, dramatically reducing the time and complexity of manually installing each physical or virtualized computer."

Yeah, turns out investors shouldn't just take a snapshot of how technology has advanced in the operating system. Somehow, the uptake just might be smoother this time around than it was three, six or 10 years ago.

It's a technological and investment application from a quote my father once passed on to me that I think stems originally from The Great One, Wayne Gretzky: "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."

If you're making blind guesses about the potential of this Windows upgrade cycle based on what you think you know about the past Windows upgrade cycles, you might be skating in the wrong place.

P.S. I'm off to shoot "The Live Desk" on Fox News at 1:30 p.m. ET. Back in a bit.

At the time of publication, the firm in which Willard is a partner was net long Microsoft, although positions can change at any time and without notice.

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Cody Willard is the manager of a hedge fund and a contributor to the Financial Times and VON Magazine. He is also a regular guest on CNBC's Kudlow & Company and an adjunct professor at Seton Hall.

He earned a bachelor's degree in economics at the University of New Mexico. Willard appreciates your feedback -- click here to send him an email.