Microsoft's message for Win Server 2003 users: FLEE FOR YOUR LIVES

You obviously haven't seen Linux Mint. If you can use Windows XP, you won't have any problems using Mint. And a lot of the features in LibreOffice are much easier to find and use than those in Office 2010/2013.

LibreOffice for instance have massive differences in their UI

Why, because it doesn't use the well loved Ribbon?

When I last used it, it's a white page where you type on to - and what you see on the screen, is what will be printed. What's so hard about that?

I look upon myself as an advanced user of Word, so perhaps it would be harder for me to switch (and get a return on my effort), but the average user probably wouldn't even notice the difference and just think it's another version of Word.

@ByeLaw101 - "but the Desktop and LibreOffice for instance have massive differences in their UI and how they work"

Are you sure you aren't talking about Windows 8 here? If users can't handle any change, then you will never, ever, be able to upgrade your version of MS Windows or MS Office. Seeing as Windows XP is discontinued, and non-ribbon MS Office is no longer sold, what do you suggest people do, go back to typewriters?

I can remember when the company I worked for switched from MS-DOS, Word Perfect, Lotus 123, and some e-mail and calendering software whose name I can't remember, to MS Windows NT and MS Office. The users complained bitterly (OK some people whinged a bit) how they didn't know how to use MS Windows NT, MS Word and Excell were different from WP and 123 (and were therefor in their view complete crap), and that Outlook was full of bugs and didn't have the reliability or functionality of the previous e-mail solution.

Guess what management's and IT's response to that was? It was "too bad, we don't care, it's company policy, live with it". People got over it and went on with their work. There were a couple of hours of training on how to use Outlook (during which even the Microsoft partner doing the training admitted the previous e-mail system was superior), and that was it. If you couldn't figure out anything else, that was your problem. If you couldn't get your job done, well you were replaceable. It didn't take people more than a few days to find where the "whatever" button was on the new software because quite frankly, it wasn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

As for the people who had created elaborate macros to do this or that with Lotus 123? That was their problem. They had notice that a change was coming up, and it was their responsibility to deal with it. I don't recall that being much of a problem though, because there were only a couple of people doing such things (they were in accounting), and the IT department gave them a hand when they got stuck on a particular problem.

I've seen this "the common lusers will never understand anything different" excuse come up before, and it's never accorded with the actual reality that I've seen in practice. At any company that I've had experience with, the responsibility for learning to deal with new software rested with the users. If you think you need training, well here's the phone number of someone who does training, the rest is up to you. You can't handle change, well there's plenty of other people out there who can do your job.

Where the real porting problems come in seems to be mainly servers, and is caused by something called "money", or rather the lack of it. This is going to be the real problem that people with MS Windows 2003 systems will have. If you can get a budget allocated and scheduled, there's a solution to every problem, including manpower. Without that, you're screwed. That's the reality here.