Customers who purchase Windows Vista Business and Ultimate editions will have the chance until July 31 2009, to downgrade to XP Professional if they would like to.
Microsoft will provide hardware partners with the media to enable its customers to downgrade Windows Vista to Windows XP by six more months than originally planned, the company confirmed on Friday.
The move comes even as Microsoft has just released a $ 300 million marketing and advertising campaign in promoting Vista. The company is also preparing windows 7, the next version of the client operating system, for release in the next 12 to 18 months.
Customers who buy Windows Vista Business and Ultimate editions will receive OS disks to OEMs and system builders so that they can switch to XP Professional if they wish until July 31 2009.
Previously, Microsoft plans to provide the recovery disks of XP to the shareholders until January 31 2009. If a customer wants to downgrade Vista to XP after the deadline, they can ask Microsoft for the disk.
Microsoft predicts that Vista, which was introduced on January 31, 2007, and took more than five years to develop, would be the most successful release of its Windows client operating system. However, Vista has been plagued with problems and bad publicity, and loyal costumers still prefer XP including myself
