Why is Microsoft calling it Windows 7? Shouldn't it be Windows 9?
Chris Parkins
There have been bucketloads of Windows releases including the old DOS-based versions (3.0, 95, 98SE etc), NT-based New Technology versions (XP, Vista) and server versions, so it all depends what you want to count. On the Windows Team Blog, Microsoft's Mike Nash claimed: "Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore 'Windows 7' just makes sense." Later, he tried to justify that by counting all the 9x variants as version 4.0.
No count makes sense but Microsoft confusingly called its first NT operating system "Windows NT 3.1" and so the next major release was NT4. Windows 2000 naturally became 5.0, and after XP was released as 5.1, Vista became version 6. The next one therefore had to be Windows 7. And it sounds nice.
Of course, if you check Windows 7, it's actually numbered 6.1. There are lots of dumb programmers out there and — as with Windows XP — not incrementing the version number reduces the risk of software incompatibilities
