Microsoft didn't budge on its June 30 cutoff date for selling Windows XP, but it did offer OEMs the opportunity to continue selling XP through downgrade rights. In a sign of the market's resistance to Windows Vista, Dell, Hewlett Packard, and other PC makers all chose to go the downgrade rights route to keep their customers happy.
Downgrade rights, which Microsoft also offers with Windows Vista Business and Vista Ultimate as well as to volume licensing customers, give users the ability to roll back to the previous version of the product they're using. Downgrade rights have existed since 2001, but never have they received the amount of attention as they did in 2008, as the IT industry populace did everything it could to avoid using Vista.
