BBC News is today reporting that Microsoft demoed “touch Windows” at a recent conference.
According to the report, the new version has the tag “Windows 7″. I don’t know whether it’s Microsoft or BBC that’s created this title, but it’s wrong.
Starting with the earliest “big business” version and looking at only the mainstream releases1, we have Windows 3 and 3.11 (Workgroups). Then there was Windows ‘95 (version 4), then ‘98 (version 5). Following that was Windows ‘98 (and version ‘98b) for version 6 and Windows ME makes version 7. So, Windows XP is version 8 and Vista version 9.
This would, surely, makes the latest incarnation after Vista at least version 10? Even with Microsoft/BBC ignoring ME and Vista for the utter shit that they were, it would still make “touch Windows” version 8.
This paragraph in the report made me laugh:
Mr Gates, who will remain as chairman of Microsoft, said he would still have an office in Redmond and spend time writing, thinking and working on a variety of pet projects including the next generation Microsoft Office.
Rather than working on “Pet Projects” (Office a pet project now???) perhaps he should be spending time teaching his marketing people to count…
- not counting MCE and similar. ↩
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I was going to say that I think they take the numbering from NT, but even that doesn’t work out. Maybe this is why Microsoft software is so problematic - they fundamentally don’t understand numbers, so nothign ever adds up properly.
http://windows7news.com/2008/02/06/why-is-the-next-windows-called-windows-7/#comment-418
One explanation that may or may not be the right one; Microsoft just ignore certain versions of the OS at random.
You know, I forgot to include 2000 and NT! Oops! Just realised though (thinking about it via your link) perhaps it’s just “business” versions. Although, even then they would have missed Windows 2000.