One of the challenges facing Microsoft are the millions of users quite happily using the company’s older products.
While Windows XP is by far the biggest problem – only last year the number of systems running the fourteen year old operating system still outnumbered those running the latest version – Microsoft faces similar issues with its server 2003.
This week Microsoft warned support for Windows Server 2003 has entered its last one hundred days and urged customers to look at shifting onto new systems.
Interestingly most of the case studies they cite involve customers moving from on premise servers onto cloud services.
While that’s very good advice as most customers, particularly small businesses, don’t have the capabilities it shows how the industry has shifted in the last twelve years.
For most of those companies a decade ago cloud service, or Software as a Service (SaaS) as it was known then, weren’t available for most business functions. Today they are the norm and usually the best option for smaller operations.
That shift to the cloud has meant an entire industry now faces extinction as the army of suburban IT service companies that once maintained those servers are now largely redundant.
As the clock ticks down on Windows 2003 server so too does it for all the businesses that once depended upon the PC industry.