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Why Are Operating System Version Names So Absurd?
jfruh writes "Apple's spent more than a decade on version 10 — or, rather, X — of its flagship operating system, with .x versions named after big cats (and many of them, it turns out, after the same big cats). Ubuntu Linux is scrambling to find ever more obscure animals to alliteratively name its versions after. And let's not even talk about Windows, whose current shipping OS is sold as Windows 7 but is really Windows NT 6.1. Why is this area of software marketing so ridiculous?"
My friend Peter is not a rock, and my friend Thomas isn't even a twin.
Apple never would've been able to convince the Mac faithful to purchase OPENSTEP 5.0, &c.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
You cannot trademark numbers.
Also, for most non-techies, it is easier to remember "Tiger" than "10.4"
Can you believe that Fifa 98 was really made in 1997?! WOOOHOO!
And Solaris 2.x is SunOS 5.x. There's the software version and then there's the marketing name. If you haven't noticed, Windows NT went 3.1, 3.5, 4.0, 2000, XP/2003, 7/2008, 2012, 8.
It's not really any more ridiculous than any other marketing effort.
Windows, whose current shipping OS is sold as Windows 7 but is really Windows NT 6.1
This is a distinction between a brand name and a kernel version number. Why is this more absurd compared to "Precise Pangolin" for instance?
Regardless, I think you'll find names of almost any product in a sufficiently crowded marketplace become absurd as they try to differentiate themselves and also avoid stepping on any trademarked names. You see this with domain names in particular.
Naming a product to sell it in a commercial market has got nothing to do with internal release milestones, and you don't have to be a marketing expert to realize that 'Windows 11' doesn't sound especially cool, whereas 'X' or 'Wild Giraffe' both sound awesome.
The question is more ridiculous than the discrepancy.
Could we have a tag: 'newsworthy' - something to identify a story as being worth paying ANY attention to?
It helps when you're googling to know which software version you're in. Sometimes it's easier to Google for "Ubuntu Boring Beaver" than "Ubuntu 11.04" or whatever. Likewise with Windows, noone ever calls it Windows NT so noone would bother searching for Windows NT 6.1 issues.
It's all in the marketing, as many have stated.
Check out Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom! http://unsealed.k3rnel.net It's an action-RPG about Open Sourcerers.
Operating Systems are fundamentally boring. Once you get past the fanboi-ism, they are just software that sits there on your computer. They are there to *facilitate* your work, but they don't produce anything in and of themselves.
So you have to jazz them up as much as you can, so people will take notice.
i suppose MsDOS 6.22, windows 3.11, system V and AmigaOS 3.1 were much more meaningfull, right? jeez, TFA is a waste of time
...because convincing people to pay $200 to upgrade from Windows NT 6.0 to Windows NT 6.1 is not as easy as telling them it's a whole new version of Windows.
Also, Apple uses the big cat theme for the same reason. Tell somebody you want $30 to upgrade them from 10.7 to 10.8 and you wouldn't have much success. On the flip side, there's not enough of a difference between each version of Mac OS X to warrant each getting its own major number. They're all based on the same underlying kernel and subsystems but have new features and UI improvements as the big selling point.
DUH!!!!!!! Version control numbers are completely beyond the need of the laymen when it comes to OS. All they care about is if its new or different from what they are running and thus why the OS has names like Win 8 or Mountain Lion. I almost never refer to Lion as Lion except to users. To me its 10.7.# Build ##### thats all I need thats all I care about.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I thought the main reason for Windows 7 being Windows NT 6.1 was because that way they could avoid breaking driver compatibility since most of the drivers should still work between these very similar architectures. Windows NT 6.0 - Windows Vista/Server 2008 Windows NT 6.1 - Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 Windows NT 6.2 - Windows 8/Server 2012
Absurd? I don't know what you're talking about.
[posted from Quantal Quetzal 12.10b1]
...the might end up with something like:
OS
OS:The Animated Series
OS:The Next Generation
OS: Deep Space 9
OS: Voyager
OS: Enterprise
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Pick a name in alphabetical order. That way you have an idea if you have the latest version.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Not sure about why these things get such odd names for people to use ... but years ago when I still coded for a living, if we were working on something, we specifically gave it a codename which a) the marketing guys would never ever use, and b) which made it not so obvious what it was.
We used to find that if the sales guys caught whiff of something, or liked the working name, it would end up being used in customer presentations and generally cause problems as they started selling something that hadn't been released (or even coded) yet.
So project anchovy or project firkin tended to keep them away. This was done throughout development, and I believe was actually a policy.
As to why Ubuntu comes up with such odd names ... that I can't even speak to. Because "Zitty Zebra" or "Punk-Rock Platypus" never seem to make sense as official names to me.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Yeah, names. Like /.
http:///..com gotcha.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
For example, Porsche911 has been around almost fifty years (since 1963).
I wonder if anyone in 1973 wrote an article on "Porsche '911' - A Nonsensical Naming Standard?"
Maybe people in 2052 will still be driving "OS X" or "Windows Server 2052".
Feature-wise, both OS makers & auto makes have arbitrary upgrade cycles. Industry observers for both often complain about minor do-nothing incremental changes, as well as sweeping wide reaching changes (vista, anyone?).
fwiw - I believe airplane manufacturers follow a similar naming convention (737, 747, Airbus, Cesna, ...).
Spaceship manufacturers are still fairly new, but I bet in 2052 that SpaceX will still be building Falcons.
Ubuntu versions oficial names are Year.Month the Adjective Animal are only codenames for development.
The summary, folks here and the TFA(didn't read fully!) seem to be missing the point about why the internal Windows Version is 6.1 for Windows 7. The reason is that a LOT of software, drivers and other utilities have this kind of code in them:
if(first letter of Windows Version Number) is not 6 Print 'Error, OS not compatible'
Even though the software is fully compatible with the OS(because they didn't change the driver model from Vista), the non updated software from old CDs etc. throw up this error. To get around this issue, Windows internally names it 6.1, so the offending software thinks it's on some Vista service pack. Also, this is an *internal* version number compared to Apple's and Ubuntu's OSes which are the marketing names, so I don't even see why this was brought up except as flamebait.
To get around this issue, Windows internally names it 6.1, so the offending software thinks it's on some Vista service pack.
Correctly, many would say.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
This isn't why Windows 7 is 6.1, or why Windows 8 is 6.2.
The reason is that Windows 7 actually is just a minor revision on Vista, and 8 is a minor revision from that. Under the hood, the big changes were between NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5), then between 2000 and Vista (Windows 6). The changes from 5.0 to 5.1 (2000 to XP) or from 6.0 to 6.1 to 6.2 (Vista, 7, and 8) were incremental in nature as far as the inner workings of the OS are concerned.
The real reason 7 felt so much faster than Vista: When they made Vista, they planned on you booting up very infrequently, so they scheduled a lot of junk to happen at boot and login, thinking that users would just 'sleep' instead of rebooting. Windows 7 (And Vista SP2) backs off a bit and does the housekeeping when you're not using the computer. Vista actually wasn't really 'slow', it's just 'irrationally busy' doing stuff with the I/O (indexing, precaching, defragmenting, etc.) while you're just trying to get to your gosh-darned desktop.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The real reason 7 felt so much faster than Vista: When they made Vista, they planned on you booting up very infrequently, so they scheduled a lot of junk to happen at boot and login, thinking that users would just 'sleep' instead of rebooting. Windows 7 (And Vista SP2) backs off a bit and does the housekeeping when you're not using the computer. Vista actually wasn't really 'slow', it's just 'irrationally busy' doing stuff with the I/O (indexing, precaching, defragmenting, etc.) while you're just trying to get to your gosh-darned desktop.
Also, the reason people had fewer compatibility problems with 7 isn't because Microsoft fixed the OS, it's because software and hardware vendors fixed their applications and drivers.
If you tried to do anything useful on Windows Vista within the first six months after it was released, you probably had a miserable experience. If you tried to do the same stuff on Windows 7 within the first six months of that OS's release, it probably worked fine. What people don't realize is that if you did a clean install of Vista when Windows 7 was released, it would have worked fine too, because the apps had been fixed by then.
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