For most software that can be sold in a box, without an attached cloud service, this approach works.
EDIT: Also some fraction would be using them on computers that literally haven't been upgraded or connected to the internet for a decade or more.
If you don't understand Excel's history, it's better to not make such a bizarre claim.
What part of my claim is bizarre? My claim is simply that Word and Excel had 20 years of history prior to the 2003 release. Your claim that it was originally written on a different OS is not really a reasonable counter-argument. The Windows version of Excel came out 2 years after the Mac version, so that only knocks the history of the "Windows" version down to 16 years.
And that those were in turn based on the ideas of Von Neuman & co. from 1945 of tabulating numbers efficiently, and so on and so forth in roughly equivalent leaps all the way back to the first abacus.
It's so reductive of a perspective that it's self-defeating, since no human being, including you, could ever actually comprehend the entirety of technological development, or even just the post-1945 developments.
I think it is a pretty clear line between attributing the quality of a piece of software to two decades of prior development at the same company, with its own continuity of developers and institutional knowledge, as opposed to the general benefits all software gains from the industry advances it builds upon.
Even if they don't work on maintaining Office 2003 directly, they indirectly work very hard making sure every subsequent version of Windows does not break Office 2003.
It's backward compatibility if Word 2003 runs on the later Windows versions - like Windows 10 and 11. I don't know the answer to that, but I'm sure someone here does.
Though it's possible to mix and match so the OS backwards compatibility isn't the full story.
i.e. a launch copy of Word 2003 works on later OS updates, yet the final patch version of Word 2003 also works on a 2009 launch copy of 7.
Unless they're also using computers and OSes from 2003 (spoiler -- they're not because those OSes wouldn't work with today's internet), those people are benefiting from untold efforts in the meantime to maintain their OS so it has that compatibility with 20 year old user space code.
That sweet sensation of being owner of what you paid for comes as a bonus.
Not receiving new features is VERY different from not receiving maintenance. It is wholly implausible to believe that there has been zero energy spent on keeping those codebases working in the past 10 years.
You don't have to believe me, I imagine practically every reader on HN has the means to verify this for themselves.
> Plenty of people are using Word, Powerpoint, and Excel 2003 just fine
Are you claiming that a reasonable majority (for the sake of discussion) of this plenty of people are using Office 2003 on Windows XP machines??
I'd doubt it. More like there's plenty of people using old software in modern versions of Windows. The maintenance work, of course, exists and has been done indirectly, by Microsoft, in the development iterations of Windows itself.
Whether or not they make up the numerical majority of all extant users is simply irrelevant to the point of 'Plenty of people'. It's easily many, many, thousands.
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...
So you can try it out but don't open any documents, or run it while connected to the net. You'd better also not insert any images. Have fun!
We could also have a post "World where bad people don't try to break your software"
Office 2016 is going EOL in two years.
That's from Microsoft themselves. They do not hide these facts or make it hard to find.
I find it mindboggling that a simple program like text processors have to be continually updated for decades. Just program it right once for god sakes.
Your assumption that a word processor is a simple program is something you might want to consider, at a low level handling text rendering in a word processor is highly complex work. Besides text encodings regularly evolving and changing over the years especially in the pre-UTF-8 world (but even with Unicode), there's also the reality that security threats evolve over time, and once threats are discovered old code that once seemed fine becomes insecure and dangerous. In computing the reality is that there's constant change driven by supporting a regularly changing computing environment, security fixes, bug fixes, increased computing power permitting new features that are then implemented and new ideas appearing, et al. Software will always be changing, that's the way things are, there's good reasons for this. Trying to oppose that reality with an unrealistic model that doesn't account for the causes of change just leaves you misunderstanding the way the industry works.
This is in fact how all software worked until, I don't know, about two decades ago? Things being patched was a big deal, a voluntary manual process, and didn't happen often. The update would even have a well-known name like "Service Pack 2".
The idea that all software must be constantly maintained is recent and the assumption that it is necessary is mostly self-imposed by the software business. Users don't share this assumption, and in fact on many products, updates are viewed mostly neutral to negatively, other than perhaps critical security updates on products that are used in connection to the internet or untrusted data.