KEY POINTS:
US performance and metrics researcher Devil Mountain Software found nearly 35 per cent of the 3000-plus PCs it examined had been downgraded from Vista to XP.
Craig Barth, Devil Mountain's chief technology officer, used data provided by users of Devil Mountain's exo.performance.network which is partnered with Infoworld, a
PC Advisor publication - to come up with the figure. By collating such things as the vendor and system model number with manufacturers' catalogues, Barth was able to identify machines that were probably shipped in the last six months, a period when virtually every new PC was offered with Vista preinstalled.
It seems some people are taking advantage of Vista's downgrade rights - Vista Business and Vista Ultimate can be 'downgraded' to XP Professional; businesses that purchase Vista Enterprise can also downgrade to XP.
Apple doesn't have 'downgrade rights' as far as I know - you just bung your old System DVD in the drive and install the old system if you want to. But who does?
Well, some people. Pro Tools users would have been the most likely - when Leopard shipped last year, Pro Tools (by Digidesign) said a Mac OS 10.5 'Leopard'-compatible upgrade was in the works. It was still "in the works" months later and finally shipped - for a price - a few weeks ago.
This wasn't enough for many users who wanted Leopard. Many, preferring to stick with the new features of Leopard, simply jumped ship from Pro Tools to Logic, Apple's own pro audio solution. (I actually did that too. I think it was a most unsatisfactory situation for Pro Tools to put Mac users in, considering Leopard was in development for so long before it shipped. It's not like they didn't know it was coming. All my Pro Tools projects have had to be remade from scratch.)
So there are pro audio users who held off upgrading to Leopard, and there may have been some who installed Leopard, then days or weeks later went back to Tiger (OS 10.4) to be able to use Pro Tools again.
A few users, like Aral Balkan, downgraded back to Tiger because of problems with Leopard last year. (He eventually did go back to Leopard, in August this year, months after the linked post about his downgrade.)
I'm not trying to imply that Mac OS 10.5 Leopard was trouble free when it shipped. It wasn't - there were a few glitches, especially if users just ran the Upgrade option in the Installer. This applied the new system code to the System Folder, perhaps picking up pre-existing faults in the old system.
Those who chose Archive and Install had much more success, as this created a new system (Leopard) then copied across network and preferences settings to it, then compressed the original system. This is what A Balkan eventually did, ending his 'Back on Leopard' post with 'Leopard, I think we can kiss and make up now. Come 'ere you silly big cat! Awwww!'
Of course, by sheer numbers Vista bats Apple back into the bleachers, but percentages tell a different story. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster put the figures as about 19 per cent of the OS X user base over on Leopard by the end of its launch quarter, and Vista about 12-14 per cent of the Windows user base ... more than a year after its retail launch. However, Bill Gates said in May this year sales of Vista represented about 140 million copies, and that's an impressive figure. Apple's figure for Leopard was about 22-million by the end of March this year.
This was a great success for Apple. In the first full month of sales, Mac OS X 10.5 raked in 32.8 per cent more money than Tiger had in its first full month, according to The NPD Group.
But anyway, back to Microsoft. The Seattle behemoth retired the seven-year-old Windows XP from mainstream availability at the end of June this year, meaning many PC users have little choice but to use Vista, but it turns out some US some OEMs have continued to offer new PCs with XP preinstalled by doing the downgrade at the factory before selling them on.
"Vista's installed base certainly doesn't equal the number of Vista licences [that Microsoft has] sold," Barth of Devil Mountain reckons, citing his exo.performance.network data for proof. "We're seeing this a lot in the financial sector."
The site for PC Advisor has posted a guide for those looking to downgrade from Windows Vista to XP.