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.
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