Dell has announced that it will offer the aging Windows XP downgrade if customers pay a US$150 surcharge on top of their usual fee for Vista.

It appears that the move comes at the request of Microsoft, which gets a cut of the downgrade fee.

The news comes five months after Dell formally it stopped offering XP on its Inspiron consumer desktop and laptop PCs.
Dell has had a devil of a job saying no to customers who want Windows XP. So has Microsoft, and its deadline for downgrades has been pushed back twice.

Gizmondo has pointed out that market share of XP has dropped by 10 per cent during 2008, but that it still has 66 per cent of the market.

It looks like downgrade fees will be a way for the likes of Dell to make a bit of cash on the side, while seeming to discourage people from upgrading to Vista. However, Rob Enderle, president of tech consulting firm the Enderle Group, warned that XP downgrade fees will ultimately be counterproductive. He said that there was a risk that Microsoft was trading off short-term revenue for long-term customer loyalty.

Engderle said that forcing customers to go someplace they don’t want to go by raising prices is a Christmas present for Apple and those that are positioning Linux on the desktop.

Nice. Merry Christmas to you, too, Microsoft. Supply and demand is one thing but this is quite another. On the one hand, Microsoft continuously throws out propaganda of how much users just love Vista yet, on the other hand, is trying to strongarm users that love XP more and want to use their previous stable and successful operating system (which, oh by the way, doesn’t drive the need to upgrade software and performs better on new software).

Well, maybe Microsoft can take some of this extra “Microsoft Sin Tax” money and actually put out some useful additions for the suckers who purchased Vista Ultimate Edition in good faith and *gasp* FIX Vista!

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