Mike Nash, vice president of Windows product management, has revealed the following details about the naming of the next Windows OS (Windows 7) to hit the market in order to pacify the raging debate over the counting methodology used by Microsoft to reach the number "7":
"The very first release of Windows was Windows 1.0, the second was Windows 2.0, the third Windows 3.0," he said. "[But] here's where things get a little more complicated."
To reach the magic number, Microsoft tallied all Windows 9x versions -- Windows 95, 98, 98 SE and Millennium -- as Windows 4.0. By that reckoning, Windows 2000 is 5.0 and Vista is 6.0.
Windows XP -- still the most-used version of Windows by a wide margin -- was relegated to the minor 5.1 by Microsoft. "[When] we shipped Windows XP as 5.1, even though it was a major release, we didn't want to change code version numbers to maximize application compatibility," Nash explained.
To confuse matters further, Nash noted that even though the next Windows will carry the "7" moniker and is considered the seventh version of the operating system, its code will actually be marked as Windows 6.1. "We decided to ship the Windows 7 code as Windows 6.1, which is what you will see in the actual version of the product [when you run] cmd.exe," Nash said.
QUITE confusing, eh?
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