The End of Support for Windows XP and Office 2003

It’s official. Microsoft has ended support for two legacy flagship products: XP and office 2003. Both are now over 10 years old, and as Microsoft said

“Windows XP and Office 2003 were great software releases for their time, but the technology environment has shifted. Technology continues to evolve and so do people’s needs and expectations. Modern users demand technologies that fit their personal workstyle and allow them to stay productive anywhere anytime, while businesses have an ever increasing need to protect data and ensure security, compliance and manageability. It is in a company’s – and its employees’ – best interest to take advantage of the modern Windows and Office software that is designed with these needs in mind.”

XP

When XP was released, it was coming from the debacle of Millennium, an OS that didn’t strike it well with consumers. But with the release of Windows XP, Microsoft changed the environment and showed that a stable and workable OS was still in the vision of Microsoft. This in turn started the evolution within Microsoft to enhance the OS and they did that with several updates, service packs, and the continuous support of hardware devices and software drivers from numerous companies. To it’s credit, it formed the environment that showed Microsoft how to develop a workable OS that consumers would buy and use. This makes you wonder though about why Vista was released with all of the problems that it had. It was a stumbling block, which, however, was recouped with Windows 7.

Office 2003

Similarly, when Office 2003 was released, a new office suite made its mark which tied together many separate products and now information could be tied together. Kudos. This laid the foundation for Office 2007 and Office 2010. The ability to tie the different products together made it possible for users to use one product for all of their business office operations.

But for both of these products, their time has come and gone. It is now time to upgrade. Fortunately there are several ways to do this. One is to buy the software version Windows7 and Office 2007 or Office 2010. The other alternative is to use Azure Cloud to get the software that you need and run the software operations on the cloud.