Microsoft to Yank XP in 2 Years

pc world ^ | 4/23/12 | Gregg Keizer, Computerworld

[Nachum]

Microsoft has kicked off what it calls a "two-year countdown" to the death of Windows XP and the Office 2003 productivity suite.

Separately, Microsoft announced that Windows Vista, the problem-plagued operating system that never really took hold among customers, exited mainstream support on April 10. In a product's extended support phase, Microsoft provides security patches to registered users but offers other fixes, including reliability and stability updates, only to organizations that have support contracts with the company.

Windows XP and Office 2003 will no longer be supported as of April 8, 2014, a company spokeswoman said in a recent blog post. On that date, Microsoft will stop shipping security updates for both products.

At that point, XP will have become Microsoft's longest-lived operating system. The company will have maintained the software for 12 years and five months -- or about two and a half years longer than it usually supports an OS. It supported the previous record-holder, Windows NT, for 11 years and five months.

Both XP and Office 2003 have been hugely successful. XP went on sale in October 2001, and Office 2003 launched in October 2003. "Windows XP and Office 2003 were great software releases, but the technology environment has shifted," said Stella Chernyak, a Microsoft marketing director.

[Moonman62]

In that case, I hope that two years from now, a version of Linux is so user-friendly, I won’t care what Microsoft offers.

I've been hoping the same for 10 years. I try 4 or 5 distributions every year, but go back to Windows. The Linux community tends to look at user friendliness as a temporary fad.

[FlyVet]

The Linux community tends to look at user friendliness as a temporary fad.

Yeah, that's too bad. But I suppose, being geeks, they can't help but tinker with things.

"It's easy!" Yeah, it's easy for those who live, eat, and breathe computers and software all day long. But for the rest us, we like to turn it on and use it, without spending months trying to figure it out.

It can be done, though. First time I tried Open Office, never had a need for MS Office again. If someone can make a Linux version like that, I'm sold.