Microsoft to keep XP alive until 2020

With 74 percent of business PCs running XP, the extended 'downgrade' deadline is more proof that it's the OS that won't die.



Just a day before Microsoft drops support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), the company announced on Monday that people running some versions of Windows 7 can "downgrade" to the aged operating system for up to 10 years.

The move is highly unusual. In the past, Microsoft has terminated downgrade rights -- which let customers replace a newer version of Windows with an older edition without paying for two copies -- within months of introducing a new OS.



While few consumers may want to "downgrade" from Windows 7 to XP -- unlike when many mutinied against Vista three years ago -- businesses often want to standardize on a single operating system to simplify machine management.

Monday's announcement was the second Windows XP "downgrade" rights extension. Microsoft originally limited Windows 7-to-Windows XP "downgrades" to six months after Windows 7's release, but backtracked in June 2009 after an analyst with Gartner Research called the plan a "real mess."

Instead, Microsoft later said it would allow downgrades to Windows XP until 18 months after the October 2009 debut of Windows 7, or until it released Windows 7 SP1.

In either scenario, XP downgrade rights would have expired sometime in 2011, perhaps as early as April.

On Monday, Microsoft again changed its mind. Users running Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate will now be able to "downgrade" to Windows XP Professional throughout the entire lifecycle of Windows 7.

"Our business customers have told us that the removing end-user 'downgrade' rights to Windows XP Professional could be confusing," said Microsoft spokesman Brandon LeBlanc, in an entry on the a company blog.

Windows 7 Professional won't be fully retired until January 2020; the Ultimate edition will be put out to pasture five years earlier, in January 2015.

Although Microsoft said it made the change to simplify the work in tracking licensing rights for PCs, the continued popularity of Windows XP may have had something to do with it. At the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), which opened Monday in Washington, D.C., a company executive acknowledged that 74 percent of business computers still run XP.

The "downgrade" rights are available only from OEM copies of Windows 7, those that are pre-installed by computer makers.

"Going forward, businesses can continue to purchase new PCs and utilize end-user 'downgrade' rights to Windows XP or Windows Vista until they are ready to use Windows 7," LeBlanc added in his blog post.