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Comment by MichaelZuo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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