Those pesky business customers, they just won't get on board with the Vista program, it sounds like.  According to HP, the vast majority of the computers it sells (and tallies) are actually running XP even though they report every sale as a Vista sale.

"From the 30th of June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with a XP license," said Jane Bradburn, Market Development Manager, Commercial Notebooks for HP Australia.

"However, what we have been able to do with Microsoft is ship PCs with a Vista Business licence but with XP pre-loaded. That is still the majority of business computers we are selling today."

Every sale of Vista is, in all actuality, a sale of XP.

Rob Kingston, Group Manager of Commercial Product Marketing for HP said, "Looking into the crystal ball, I don't think businesses will see much value in upgrading to Vista until late next year, and even so, Microsoft will probably have come out with something else by then."

HP's revelation casts doubt over Microsoft's claims about how many copies of Vista have been sold, as HP has made clear that although a sale may be counted as 'Vista', it may actually be XP.

Ouch.  So what percentage of Microsoft's tallies of Vista were actually just Vista licenses with XP actually running on the machine?  Half?  More?

It looks like Microsoft is going to try to curtail this process in 2009, according to the article, but many PC vendors are already trying to circumvent this.  Like every EEE clone for instance.