Microsoft Skipped "Windows 9" Name Because Of Legacy Code Compatibility Issues

[geeteam]

Microsoft surprised everyone by announcing Windows 10′ as their name for the upcoming version of Windows few days back. But why did Microsoft decide to skip the most obvious name Windows 9?

According to latest reports, Microsoft decided to go with Windows 10 branding to avoid issues related to Windows 95/Windows 98 legacy code.

Microsoft dev here, the internal rumours are that early testing revealed just how many third party products that had code of the form

if(version.StartsWith(Windows 9″))

{ /* 95 and 98 */

} else {

and that this was the pragmatic solution to avoid that.

If Microsoft named it as Windows 9, all classic apps with the above code structure will treat it as either Windows 95 or Windows 98.

So, Microsoft decided to avoid it by naming it Windows 10.

LOL at the real reason MSFT went straight to Windows 10!

This code is all over the place: "https://t.co/mHqYMPDocw" "pic.twitter.com/t6UI8XVHCd" Christer Kaitila (@McFunkypants) October 1, 2014

Source

[CODYQX4]

Crappy code checks are one thing.

But when have they ever been able to count? After all, Xbox One is really Xbox Three.

Maybe we can get Office and Visual Studio 2020 soon, to hell with 2016.

[brain_death]

Actually, it is Windows 6.4 or will be when it's finished...

More like Windows 6.3 (aka 8.1) in drag, if you look even slightly beneath the surface of this preview.

It seems that Windows version numbering is following the confusing example of Adobe's Flash Player!

:thumbsdown:

[debebee]

They just wanted to keep up With Apple's Numbering Scheme...

9 being less than 10

[exitrade]

They just wanted to keep us With Apple's Numbering Scheme...

9 being less than 10

agree!

[LeeSmithG]

I think M$ need to hire a Witch-Doctor.

[CODYQX4]

They just wanted to keep us With Apple's Numbering Scheme...

9 being less than 10

agree!

So the next commercial peddling crappy Lumia will be Cortana saying WP is better than iOS because WP is V11 and V11 surely must be better than anything V9?

MS would stoop that low probably, since I've never in my life even seen a Windows Smartphone in the wild.

At least they didn't call it Windows X.

[Karlston]

So the next commercial peddling crappy Lumia will be Cortana saying WP is better than iOS because WP is V11 and V11 surely must be better than anything V9?

Agreed. Like after Google abandoned the established long standing versioning standards and started labelling every minor tweak of Chrome as a major version increase, Mozilla thought the same and abandoned the same standards with Firefox.

Chrome 14 just had to be better than Firefox 5, because 14 is bigger than 5, right! :rolleyes:

[CODYQX4]

So the next commercial peddling crappy Lumia will be Cortana saying WP is better than iOS because WP is V11 and V11 surely must be better than anything V9?

Agreed. Like after Google abandoned the established long standing versioning standards and started labelling every minor tweak of Chrome as a major version increase, Mozilla thought the same and abandoned the same standards with Firefox.

Chrome 14 just had to be better than Firefox 5, because 14 is bigger than 5, right! :rolleyes:

The sad thing is that Chrome will probably be the first app that isn't versioned in things like SVN/GIT Revisions/etc, to hit a 3 digit version number.

We'll have Chrome V100+ in less than a decade.

[LeeSmithG]

Like the naming of Star Trek movies.

6 has to be better than 2 because it's a bigger number and 2 better than 1, as 2 is twice as big as 1.

First time I cam across Mozilla was in 1998 and build was 0.5.xx

So it should be more than 16.

I.E. was in 1998 4 or beta 5.

16 years away, only 11.

I know people that prefer Firefox 3 series over I think it's 33b9.

This time next year it will probably be Firefox 50 & google, googol.

[mjall]

they had earlier windows Me and XP which were not called by numbers so if I was Microsoft rather than looking like fools to the public and announcing such internal faults in coding I would just change the name from windows 9 to something else and case closed