Downgrade to XP - Isn't that a step in the wrong direction?

Offering an XP downgrade disc with your PC doesn't show much confidence in Vista.

In the recent stack of ad-mail I receive with my local newspaper was a flyer from Staples, an office supply store. Staples is offering an HP mini-notebook that comes pre-loaded with Windows Vista Business Edition. The ad boldly declares that the machine also comes with a "Windows XP downgrade disk."

It seems Apple's Mac-PC ads that poked fun at Vista's shortcomings were not at all off the mark.

A friend recently bought a new notebook that came pre-loaded with Vista. He kept if for almost a full day before packing it up, taking it back, and buying a Mac instead.

To be fair, my friend is not the most technically-inclined individual. With a little patience and a lot of technical support (probably from me) he could have gotten by. Over time he may even have become comfortable with it.

The point is, getting comfortable with Vista shouldn't take so long.

Granted, every new system presents a learning curve. But if Microsoft spent half as much effort on creating an intuitive, user-friendly interface as it does on marketing, that learning curve could be painlessly short. Instead, even long-term Windows users, upon "upgrading" to Vista, found themselves lost in a sea of changes, many of them apparently made just for the sake of change. Vista proved to be another example of Microsoft bloat-ware: resource intensive, incompatible with existing systems, and difficult to use.

This isn't just my opinion. Proof: Major vendors, like Hewlett-Packard, are shipping XP downgrade discs with some of their Vista systems. Thus the Staples ad.

Of course, there are alternatives.

My friend discovered that Macs live up to their reputation for an intuitive, user-friendly experience. Before long he was busy editing his home movies in iMovie and organizing his photo collection in iPhoto. While on vacation he kept in touch with his Windows-bound relatives back home through Skype.

There's also Linux. In the past this open source alternative was suited only to die-hard techies, people who relished getting their hands dirty in the command line. But most distributions now come with the latest versions of Gnome and KDE, desktop environments that are every bit as user-friendly as Windows XP, and more so than Vista.

Further, Linux tends to be more stable and secure than any Windows flavor. There are countless thousands of high-quality open source and commercial applications for it. And it's free!

Why would anyone downgrade to XP, or to Vista for that matter, when they could upgrade to a Mac or to Linux?