Support ends in 2014 for Windows XP and Office 2003

microsoft.com

25 points·fibo··9 comments

1. why does your title say 'Finally'? It says nothing about the article, I have no idea what to expect on that page before I click on it, and it doesn't match the article title.

2. what is the news? We've known for years when the EOL for XP is.

From the site:

"Based on historical customer deployment data, the average enterprise deployment can take 18 to 32 months from business case through full deployment."

The average is between 1 1/2 and almost 3 years? Sweet Jesus.

It's not always a simple thing. Lots of corporate apps are only bug-compatible with particular versions of some tools. I know of one large company who has told everyone do NOT update your Java when prompted, or blah blah chaos blah.

Stuff has to be tested, and mitigation routes planned. Corporations are a mess of organically accreted apps, kludges and workarounds.

I was originally excited for this because I thought it would help with the IE problems. Then I learned that some of our corporate customers are now running Windows 7 and their IT had them downgrade to IE 8. Ack.

There are a lot of companies using IE-only web apps (if you can call them that) that only work with older versions of Internet Explorer. It's pretty unfortunate.

And don't forget MS will support IE8 on Win7 until 2020!

They should wait for Windows 9 ;)

It doesn't get any more arrogant than that! "Finally" - really?! While some people in their golden high income cage might be happy about planned obsolescence, many businesses in less well-off places in Latin America and Africa are basically still relying on XP because it works and there's only little budget power.

Yeah, it's too bad there aren't any free operating systems or suites of office productivity apps.

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