Windows Version numbers

I hate it when a political blogger explains a geek idea better than geeks. It proves that gees are too close to the issue to properly explain it to those far away. It is like trying to explain why elephants have tails at both end to someone who has never seen an elephant's trunk in action.

The geek (circus performer) says "An elephant's trunk is flexible, sensitive and a miracle to watch when the elephant needs to manipulate it's environment. "

The observer responds "What does the other tail do?" To which the geek stops and stares with that look programmers have when a user asks if the colors of the interface can be changed.

If you ask Microsoft's PR department, they will tell you that Windows 95/98/ME were Windows 4, Windows 2000 was Windows 5.0, Windows XP was Windows 5.1, and Windows Vista was Windows 6.0, which it appears to make a certain amount of sense to follow with Windows 7. ... Rather than attempting to put a lot of new features in the next Windows, Microsoft decided to fix the problems with Vista, wait for better driver support, and slim the code down so that it would run better on current hardware. They wanted drivers that had been developed for Vista to work on their new system, so as to not be hit by driver incompatibility problems again. They largely did this. Windows 7 is largely "A slimmer Vista that Works". In defence of Vista, after two service packs and some, Vista pretty much works at this point, too. However, due to the bad reputation of Vista, Microsoft wanted to sell the new product as something new that it would dissociate from Vista. So, they did the same thing that had been done to disassociate XP from Windows 2000, which is that they gave the default screen lots of different colours from the previous release. And they gave it a brand new name that sounded like a version number of a major release. Except, of course, if you go look in the registry, there is a dark secret. That's right. If you ask Windows 7 what its version number is, it answers that it is version 6.1. "Windows 7" is not actually a version number. It is a version name. There is something very Microsoft about this. There is actually a good reason for this. When drivers are being installed, the registry is examined to check the version number of Windows to see if they are compatible with the operating system. Usually, they decide if they are compatible or not based on the major version number - ie the number before the point. If this is different from what they expect they may refuse to install. If the registry was set to 7.0 then many drivers that were previously designed for Vista would not install, even though Windows 7 might well work fine with them in all other ways. This suggests something slightly askew in the overall design of Windows driver support model, but we shall let this pass for now. Given, though, that Microsoft has gone to some trouble to minimise changes from Vista so that Vista drivers will continue to work on the new system, it probably is reasonable to conclude that from a technical perspective, 6.1 is a more reasonable version number than 7.0. samizdata

It might look like I've quoted, but it was very difficult to resist reposting the entire text of the article.

I cannot blame Microsoft. I work for a company where we have to make these kinds of decisions every day. "What will it break?" "What will it fix?" "Who will it hurt?" "Who will blame us?" "How bad will we be if ..?"