Buy a business laptop from any major manufacturer this month and there is a good chance it arrives with Vista Business on the licence and Windows XP on the disk. The manufacturer installs the older operating system deliberately, and Microsoft permits it, and this is an official arrangement with a name.
Downgrade rights. Consider how much has to have gone wrong for that phrase to exist.
The list of complaints about Vista is long and mostly fair. It wants more memory than the machines companies bought two years ago have in them. Driver support for older printers and scanners ranges from patchy to absent. The security prompts interrupt constantly enough that the first thing many administrators do is switch them off, which defeats the point. Line-of-business applications written against XP sometimes work and sometimes do not, and finding out which requires testing every one.
All true, all repeated everywhere, and all beside the point.
The thing that has actually happened is that a large number of IT directors ran the numbers on migrating and concluded they could simply not do it. Not defer it. Not phase it. Not do it, indefinitely, and keep buying new hardware with the old operating system on it, and revisit the question in a few years.
That option was always theoretically available and nobody took it, because the assumption underneath the whole industry was that you upgrade when the vendor ships. Everyone did it for 95, for 98, for 2000, for XP. It was treated as weather rather than a decision.
Vista is the release where enough organisations examined the assumption to discover it was optional.
What makes refusal viable is that XP is good enough at the things a business actually needs. It runs the applications. It is stable after six years of patching. Staff know it. The productivity gain from moving to something newer is, for a person entering numbers into a database all day, genuinely close to zero, and the cost of the migration is genuinely enormous. Once someone puts both figures on the same slide the decision makes itself.
Microsoft’s business assumes this does not happen. The revenue model depends on a fairly reliable upgrade cadence across an installed base of hundreds of millions of seats, and it depends on that cadence being close to automatic. Downgrade rights are the company conceding the point while trying to keep the licence revenue, which is clever, and which also tells you exactly how worried somebody is.
The consequence I would watch for is not this release. It is the next one. Microsoft now has to persuade a customer base that has learned it can say no, and persuasion is a much harder business than inertia.
XP is currently scheduled to stop being sold through OEMs early next year. I will be surprised if that date survives contact with the people buying.