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Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003

Support Ends April 8, 2014

Why is Microsoft ending support for Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003?

WHY?
Why is Microsoft ending support for Windows XP and Office 2003?
In 2002 Microsoft introduced its Support Lifecycle policy based on customer feedback to have more transparency and predictability of support for Microsoft products. As per this policy, Microsoft Business and Developer products, including Windows and Office products, receive a minimum of 10 years of support (5 years Mainstream Support and 5 years Extended Support), at the supported service pack level. Thus, Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 will go out of support on April 8, 2014. If your organization has not started the migration to a modern desktop, you are late. Based on historical customer deployment data, the average enterprise deployment can take 18 to 32 months from business case through full deployment. To ensure you remain on supported versions of Windows and Office, you should begin your planning and application testing immediately to ensure you deploy before end of support.

Enterprise PC demand may benefit from the end of Windows XP support

Aaron Lee, Taipei; Joseph Tsai, DIGITIMES [Monday 29 July 2013] As Microsoft is set to end its support for Windows XP in April, 2014, sources from the upstream supply chain believe the action will help trigger a PC replacement trend in the enterprise market. Since the enterprise market has not had any major PC hardware upgrades for over two years, the business opportunity is expected to benefit long-term vendors Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Dell as well as attract players such as Acer and Asustek Computer to turn more aggressive about the industry. In their recent financial reports, HP and Dell already saw sales from the enterprise PC business improving, and Dell is expected to enjoy better shipment growth from enterprise models than consumer models in 2014. Meanwhile, HP has a chance of achieving sequential shipment growth of 15% in the third quarter mainly due to government procurement orders. Lin Tsuwei (transliterated from Chinese), an executive of Acer's enterprise business unit said that the company's enterprise notebook shipments will see growth of 5% in 2013. Currently, about 10% of Acer's notebook shipments and 50% of desktop shipments are enterprise models, Lin noted. In 2014, Lin expects Acer's enterprise business to see 20-30% growth on year. As Google's Chromebooks are seeing increasing demand in the consumer market, Acer is also considering developing related products for the enterprise industry and is expected to launch enterprise tablets as early as the first half of 2014.