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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.
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.
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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.
...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
Pfft. They'd abuse it like the "story" tag that gets put onto non-stories all the time.
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E pluribus sanguinem
This is correct. MS changes the kernel major version number when they introduce major (sometimes backward-incompatible) driver-interface changes. They actually aren't always backward-incompatible; NT6.0 (Vista) would actually load most NT5.1 (XP) or even 5.0 (2000) drivers just fine... but it wasn't generally supported, and the installers would freak out at the changed major version number (this could be worked around by running in Compatibility Mode to spoof the version info, among other things). Besides, some drivers (notably network and printer drivers, which had significant interface changes) just *didn't* work correctly, if at all, with NT6.x. Windows 8 is still NT 6.2 because, although they've removed a few more of the old NT5.x driver interfaces, the 6.x drivers will still work.
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If you type "/." in your address bar in Opera, it will take you to slashdot.
A site about proctologists???
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
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.