Two-year countdown for Windows XP support has begun

The final countdown has begun for Microsoft’s 11-year-old operating system Windows XP, as the software giant kicked off a two-year knell for it.

 

Microsoft marketing director Stella Chernyak said Microsoft is finally pulling the plug on XP and Microsoft’s Office 2003 productivity suite by April 8, 2014.

 

“Back in October we celebrated the anniversaries of Windows XP and Office 2003 and took the opportunity to remind everyone that on April 8, 2014, we will officially end support for these versions of Windows and Office. Today, we want to acknowledge the two-year countdown to the end of Windows XP and Office 2003 support, which was this past Sunday. If you still have some PCs running Windows XP and Office 2003 in your organization, now would be a good time to start migrating them to Windows 7 and Office 2010,” Chernyak said in a blog post.

 

She said that while XP and Office 2003 were “great software releases for their time,” the technology environment has shifted.

 

Technology continues to evolve and so do people’s needs and expectations, she added.

 

“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,” she said.

 

A separate article on PC World said that by April 8, 2014, XP would have been 12 years and five months old. Windows NT had been supported for 11 years and five months.

 

But PC World noted that as early as June 2011, a Microsoft manager said it was “time to move on” from Windows XP ().

 

On the other hand, it cited figures from Internet measurement company Net Applications that in the last 12 months, XP has lost nearly 10 percentage points of share, or 14 percent of what it had as of April 1, 2011.

 

“As Net Applications’ data hints, some PCs will still be running Windows XP when Microsoft retires the operating system,” it said. — TJD, GMA News