Downgrade Rights Limited

An unusual provision in the OEM End User License Agreement (EULA) for Windows 7 will offer downgrade rights to both Vista and Windows XP. This is more generous than the downgrade rights that came with OEM versions of Vista, which allowed customers to downgrade only to Windows XP, the most recent OS. In Microsoft parlance, Vista offered only an n-1 downgrade, where n is the current shipping version. Note that volume upgrade licenses to Windows 7 Professional and OEM licenses to which Software Assurance, Microsoft’s maintenance and upgrade rights license add-on, has been attached are not affected by these restrictions: these licensees can downgrade to previous business versions of the OS, as well as to Windows 98 or 95.

The n-2 provision for Windows 7 reflects the current market reality: most business customers are still using Windows XP, whereas when Vista shipped, six years after Windows XP was released, the n-2 version (Windows 2000) was no longer in Mainstream support and few business customers were still using it.