Speculating why MS choose the name "Windows 10"?

[Draconica5]

This information I got from some comments on Reddit.
Basically, a lot of program already see "Windows 95" and "Windows 98" as "Windows 9".
That means we already have "windows 9" from a long time ago! And that's why MS can't use the name "Windows 9" anymore....

cranbourne 953 points 3 days ago

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.

arizmendi 15 points 2 days ago

They don't check the version, they check the OS. Run this search:

https://searchcode.com/?q=if(version,startswith("windows+9")

read it and weep.

Source: cranbourne comments on New Windows Version will be called Windows 10

 

[maktaba]

re: The (false) reason why MS choose the name "Windows 10"?

This makes sense! Though if that were the case they would not have used any number for the new Windows, they would have named it "Windows One" easily.

Many analysts are saying they named it "Windows 10" because it will be the last Windows. Perhaps the updates will be named thus: 10.1, 10.2, etc.

 

[jlzimmerman]

re: The (false) reason why MS choose the name "Windows 10"?

There's already a thread on this, and a link provided had some insight on what you mentioned, plus other reasons such as 9 translating to "no" in German. But I think that's bunk, because German has a proper translation to the English number "9." There's also the theory that 9 is an unlucky word or term in Chinese.

I believe its based on the NT kernel versions, which then technically Windows 8.1 should have been called Windows 9.

 

[a5cent]

Sorry, but this is just FUD. It's wrong for a million different reasons, one being that Windows never identified itself as version 95 or 98. Both of those are marketing names, under which those products were sold, but the actual version numbers reported by Windows are listed here:

Operating System Version (Windows)

Furthermore, Windows 10 identifies as version 6.4. As you can see "Windows 9" or even just "9" were never used as a "real" version identifier. Not ever. Windows 95 was actually Windows 4.0.

If you are talking about how the Java platform dealt with version numbers (not Windows), then yes, some Java programmers may have created buggy code by only checking part of the version string that was reported by the JVM, but it's very unlikely that MS decided to change their product's version number based on bugs that a minority of unskilled java programmers created over a decade ago.