Windows "7"

[Matt_H]

Had a very brief chance to play with Windows 7 for the first time last weekend. Here I am thinking that Microsoft has finally moved away from arbitrary names for their products ("ME", "XP", "Vista") and gone back to a nice, sensible naming scheme based on version numbers.

Not so! A quick glance at the "About Windows" entry in the help menu reveals that Windows 7 is actually Windows 6.1, internally.

While it's true that Windows 7 is barely different from Vista, you'd think they would have at least bumped the internal version number.

[Matt_H]

If you REALLY want to get technical about the numbers, After NT 4, NT 5 was sent out for beta testing, but it was too late in the cycle, and they pulled it. Windows 2000(was completely different then NT5) (should be Windows 6) and then ME (Windows 7 -Technical), then XP (Windows 8, but called 5.1), then Vista (Windows 9) and Finally "Windows 7" should be Windows 10 in my book, and thats not including all the "server" packages which are technically different.

Sure, if you want to replace each named release with a sequential number, that makes sense. But I'm talking about internal version numbering with the traditional version.revision numbering convention.

Windows 95 was obviously Windows 4.0 - prerelease hype even referred to it as such. 98 and ME - though marketed (and priced) as major releases - were not fundamentally different. Hence they have internal numbers in the 4.x range. Windows 2000 was a significant enough change to see the version number bumped to 5. XP was another incremental improvement, so its version is 5.1. Vista was a fairly substantial overhaul, so there's an internal bump to 6.0, while Windows 7 is apparently a minor improvement on that, to 6.1.

My point is that I thought Microsoft's marketing machine was once again making the internal match the external, but it seems that's not the case. Windows 7 is just another name, not a number of any internal significance.

[Matt_H]

@ DonnyEMU

I just reread your post. Incredible! It's a design flaw! They've really boxed themselves into a corner, haven't they?

From the Register article you linked:

The problem is that the operating system is full of internal dependencies, and as Russinovich admitted: "We don't really understand those dependencies".

Hilarious!

[Matt_H]

No argument here about that. I have been saying since the beta, that windows 7 is just Vista version 2.0 or "Vista Reloaded" (ME 3.0)

I'll probably be thinking of it as Vista SP2 for some time to come

[Matt_H]

@ swift240

Seen this before?

[Matt_H]

Windows 7 is best.Because it has better features then the other.And Windows 7 is a vast improvement from Vista as it takes up much less ram and has other optimizations such as fast booting times. I recommend Windows 7, and if you really don't want vista and don't want to wait for the final version of Windows 7, you can download a copy of the Release Candidate from the Microsoft website for free and use it up till June of 2010. I am working with the Release Candidate right now and so far I have absolutely no complaints, considering Im a heavy computer use with advanced software.

Uh, the "final" version of Windows 7 was released months ago - there's no wait for it whatsoever.

[Matt_H]

Kindly reconcile the version numbers of Kickstart, Workbench and Amiga OS and get back to me, slappy.

Haha, true! But those numbers never matched, nor were they ever intended to.

[Matt_H]

I have to laugh at quite a few of the posts made in this thread.

First of all, the version number.  Who here hasn't learnt already that version numbering is pretty arbitrary everywhere?  Some developers use it to show that they've reached a certain milestone, others never get to version 1 because they kind of see that as reaching perfection, others use it partly to show when a batch of security patches have been released, the list of different uses goes on.  The only silly thing about the version number is, if it's true, that MS didn't put it up to 7.0 because of (potential?) compatibility issues.  Personally I think Win7 is v6.1 because it is a patched-up version of Vista

Absolutely it's a patched up Vista! So why didn't they just release it as Windows 6.1? Of course the naming is arbitrary, I just thought it was dumb/weird of them to make the fundamental marketing shift from the year-based release names they've been using since Windows 95, back to number-based release names like Windows 3.1, and not have internal and external version numbers match.

however the OP's comment about it being "barely different" - I bet 9 out of 10 people who upgraded from Vista (usually because of performance issues) to it would disagree with you.  There's an enormous performance difference.

I don't doubt that there's a tremendous performance difference, not one bit. But will you agree that 7 isn't substantively different from Vista apart from the critical bug/performance fixes? The Vista-to-7 transition seems much more like the 95-to-98 transition (or 2000-to-XP transition) rather than the 3.1-to-95 transition (or even XP-to-Vista transition). That is to say, under-the-hood improvements and tweaks rather than a fundamentally changed user interaction experience.


EDIT: A reference point for my comments in this thread: Table of Windows versions. Note the internal version in the 4th column matches the external version until Windows 95.