Microsoft also makes Windows, and Windows takes backwards compatibility very seriously.

Even if they don't work on maintaining Office 2003 directly, they indirectly work very hard making sure every subsequent version of Windows does not break Office 2003.

No, they are perfectly usable and functional even on Windows XP or Vista or 7 computers that haven't been touched or connected to the internet since 2012.

That's not backward compatibility then - those are the systems it was made for (Windows 7 would then have been made backwards compatible for Office 2003).

It's backward compatibility if Word 2003 runs on the later Windows versions - like Windows 10 and 11. I don't know the answer to that, but I'm sure someone here does.

Oh, I wasn't responding to the first point, of course Microsoft takes backward compatibility seriously.

Though it's possible to mix and match so the OS backwards compatibility isn't the full story.

i.e. a launch copy of Word 2003 works on later OS updates, yet the final patch version of Word 2003 also works on a 2009 launch copy of 7.

It is amusing that your argument for software not needing “maintenance” is pointing out 3 pieces of software that had each received 20 years of maintenance by the time they reached the year you picked, 2003.

I've edited my comment since it appears your the third person confused as to the possibility of using them on older computers.

I think you are confused because the 2003 version of those products had already had as many as 20 years of maintenance, in the form of prior releases upon which they were based. Word was first released in 1983 and Excel in 1985.

The 1985 version of Excel was Mac only. The 2003 version is about as closely related as iOS is to Mac System 7.

If you don't understand Excel's history, it's better to not make such a bizarre claim.

Did the development of Excel 2003 not benefit from all of the work done in the previous versions? Even if it had been a from-scratch rewrite, which it was not, it would have still benefited from the design iteration and experience of the development team in solving the same problems in previous versions. Excel 2003 was not a first-release that was suddenly a refined product that would be useful for years without additional maintenance. I used Excel a few times in the 80s, and regularly through the 90s and early 2000s on Macs and Windows and wrote quite a bit of VBA for them professionally.

What part of my claim is bizarre? My claim is simply that Word and Excel had 20 years of history prior to the 2003 release. Your claim that it was originally written on a different OS is not really a reasonable counter-argument. The Windows version of Excel came out 2 years after the Mac version, so that only knocks the history of the "Windows" version down to 16 years.

By the same logic someone could claim that 1985 Excel was in fact based on the preceding 20 years of mainframe and minicomputer software and the very first spreadsheet-esque programs.

And that those were in turn based on the ideas of Von Neuman & co. from 1945 of tabulating numbers efficiently, and so on and so forth in roughly equivalent leaps all the way back to the first abacus.

It's so reductive of a perspective that it's self-defeating, since no human being, including you, could ever actually comprehend the entirety of technological development, or even just the post-1945 developments.

No human being except you, apparently.

I think it is a pretty clear line between attributing the quality of a piece of software to two decades of prior development at the same company, with its own continuity of developers and institutional knowledge, as opposed to the general benefits all software gains from the industry advances it builds upon.

No it's not a clear line at all. In fact Lotus 1-2-3 was literally the direct predecessor from IBM in terms of everything but the brand name and some design choices.

It was also selling for 20 years. Its the same with physicall products if it sels u will update and maintain the product.

Funny you mentioned 2003 since that's the exact version Ms Office I use ;)

if you think those aren't receiving maintenance you're not paying attention or are ignorant as to how hard it is to keep a complex app compiling as operating systems move forward.

Not receiving new features is VERY different from not receiving maintenance. It is wholly implausible to believe that there has been zero energy spent on keeping those codebases working in the past 10 years.

I don't think you understand. Office 2003 (or earlier) and similar products aren't constantly phoning home for updates like more recent software. Millions of people have had a single 100% static binary for these programs running on their computer for many years. The ability to phone home, if it exists at all, may even be broken or disabled.

This is in fact how all software worked until, I don't know, about two decades ago? Things being patched was a big deal, a voluntary manual process, and didn't happen often. The update would even have a well-known name like "Service Pack 2".

The idea that all software must be constantly maintained is recent and the assumption that it is necessary is mostly self-imposed by the software business. Users don't share this assumption, and in fact on many products, updates are viewed mostly neutral to negatively, other than perhaps critical security updates on products that are used in connection to the internet or untrusted data.

Single static binary software, the blessed future we never saw.

As beautiful as it is, and for the all the problems dynamic linking causes, the edges on single static binary software are very, very sharp.

I'm not sure what to say to this... you can just buy an old copy of Office 2003 on eBay, an old Windows XP computer, and boot it up and try it out?

You don't have to believe me, I imagine practically every reader on HN has the means to verify this for themselves.

Sure you can do that. But look at the list of 60 vulnerabilities with score 9+ that you're exposing yourself to:

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=...

So you can try it out but don't open any documents, or run it while connected to the net. You'd better also not insert any images. Have fun!

We could also have a post "World where bad people don't try to break your software"

You answered your own issues. Dont open untrusted documents from the net. not running while connected to the net seems mute as the software doesnt directly access the internet. Seems like issues even the most up to date software suffers from.

That kind of rethoric doesn't fly too far... Your original point was

> Plenty of people are using Word, Powerpoint, and Excel 2003 just fine

Are you claiming that a reasonable majority (for the sake of discussion) of this plenty of people are using Office 2003 on Windows XP machines??

I'd doubt it. More like there's plenty of people using old software in modern versions of Windows. The maintenance work, of course, exists and has been done indirectly, by Microsoft, in the development iterations of Windows itself.

If you also include Windows 2000, Vista, and 7 computers that weren't updated in the last decade, I think that would be a sizeable fraction of all Office 2003 users in 2023.

Whether or not they make up the numerical majority of all extant users is simply irrelevant to the point of 'Plenty of people'. It's easily many, many, thousands.

Support for Office 2003 ended in 2014. Close to a decade ago. No maintenance, no patches, no service packs, nothing. No energy expended working on that codebase.

Office 2016 is going EOL in two years.

That's from Microsoft themselves. They do not hide these facts or make it hard to find.

And?

I find it mindboggling that a simple program like text processors have to be continually updated for decades. Just program it right once for god sakes.

You vastly underestimate the complexity involved. Also, new attacks get discovered that were not even dreamed 20 years ago. There is no "just get it right" when right is measured by what we know, and that keeps changing.

* * *

Unlike recent versions of Office, old ones didn't call home, and Microsoft doesn't really have an idea of how many copies of their software are still in use in some cases.

> Plenty of people are using copies of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel 2003 just fine

Unless they're also using computers and OSes from 2003 (spoiler -- they're not because those OSes wouldn't work with today's internet), those people are benefiting from untold efforts in the meantime to maintain their OS so it has that compatibility with 20 year old user space code.

I have a Pentium 4 machine running Win XP in regular operation since 2003. I use it to create content in CorelDRAW 11 and AutoCAD 2004.

That sweet sensation of being owner of what you paid for comes as a bonus.

Somebody has to maintain the software, be it the devs or the end users.