this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
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Microsoft have sucked at naming things basically forever. Look at their windows versions. First they were numbered after the year release which made sense, they kind of break the trend with millennium edition but it's still sort of worked because it came out in 2000. Was also a 2000 which confused things and then after that it just continued to go downhill.
95, 98, 2000 (presumably because they didn't want to call it 00), XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10 (because nine is evil for some reason), 11
There's a rumor the next version is going to be called X, I assume because they haven't really advanced as a company since the '90s and they still think that's cool.
Keeps support for poorly coded programs working. In the old days, a quick and hacky way to determine which Windows version the system was on was to have the program check the OS name. If the name started with the characters "Windows 9" you knew it was either Win95 or Win98 and ran in one mode, but if it was something else it ran in the other mode. If the new OS was named Windows 9, then certain old programs would break when run on it. Yes, the people who would have coded that way are idiots, and sure, the number of people running those programs may be in the single digits, but Microsoft has been pretty serious about maintaining backwards compatibility, even if that means ever more cruft and jank.
The other reason is marketing. "See? It's not anything like that awful Windows 8! We skipped all the way to 10 to demonstrate how different it is! Please come back!"