The first version that was widely released was Windows 3.1 (this is what Windows 7 is getting back to, the relase number system for simplicity’s sake).

Then Came NT which was developed for the professional environment as an attempt to take on a new OS in town (Linux). (These OS’s eventually moved into the server realm and are not considered part of Microsoft’s PC operating systems.

Next was Windows 95 (or 4.0 if they had kept the original naming scheme. They changed it because at the time most people had never heard of a release candidate, alpha, beta, pre-release version of software.)

Next up was Windows 98 (or 4.5) it was basically an upgrade to windows 95. Not a whole lot of features just a new name.

Then came ME AND 2000 they were different releases of the same operating system (5.0)

Followed by XP (5.5) which was built on the stability of ME and 2000. (XP was a play on the word experience because at the time microsoft thought it would be brilliant to roll out software as a service and instead of selling the software on a disk you would access it and run it over the internet as a terminal and therefore fall in love with the “microsoft experience”)

The next major release of Microsoft Software was Vista (6.0) which was a major upset for the company.

And now we have Windows 7 (7.0 for those of you who are paying attention. which brings us back to the original naming convention of release number. (now that most people understand the concept of build and release numbers.) (the higher the number the better the software [typically])

sorry to ramble just had to clear some things up

And now there is:
Windows 7 (version 6.1)
Tell me how that is even related to “It’s about time Microsoft adopted a naming system that might actually make some sense to users” That makes absolutely no sense. it is technically the 9th release of Windows (i am counting ME and 2000 as 1since ME was the home user edition and 2000 was the business edition) and the 5th NTFS release.

In short, not what i would call a naming scheme. Mac (and i am not exactly a fan of these beastlies) on the other hand used to have a naming scheme that made sense. The “X” in OS X that is “so hard to pronounce” stands for 10 as in after OS 9….. they are still sticking to version numbers though.
You want an OS with a real naming scheme? take a look at Ubuntu, titled after the release year.month. example: 8.10 what released in October of 2008 and 9.04 will be released in april of 2009.

In MS Vista’s case this means something you better watch from far away.

But there are also examples that give us hope for Windows 7 on older Hardware:
http://max.zamo...1600-tablet-pc/

Or I think they have not given it a permanent name yet…

The reason they are used interchangeably is that, generally speaking, only Apple computers run Mac, and unless you install an OS via Boot Camp, Apple computers run only Mac.

Haha, jk, I just had to add to da chain.

I’ve been around long enough to have talked to people at Microsoft during the naming of all these Windows releases. Back when the very first version of Windows NT was released, they called it 3.1. This didn’t make any sense because such a naming scheme implied that it was a minor update to a non-existent 3.0 release. But the wizards in Microsoft’s marketing department explained that it was much more important to be consistent with other releases of Windows (16-bit) which were on their 3.1 release.

Then, because every new marketing person must prove their worth by demonstrating how wrong their predecessors were, the new Microsoft marketing people said they had to move to a yearly naming convention because if you incorporated the date into the name of the product, people will realize that they are running an obsolete version as the years go by. Who wants to be running Windows 95 in the year 2000 when there is Windows 2000 available?

Then the next wave of Microsoft marketers came into the company and said that the yearly naming conventions are bad because (1) Microsoft doesn’t release a new OS every year, and (2) there is much more opportunity to come up with an exciting and effective marketing campaign based on a name and concept rather than on something as cold and unemotional as a date. So, they gave us Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Now, there must be a whole new gang of marketing people who joined the company. And, we’ve come full circle. After all, there are only so many ways to name a product. So, now they are back to version numbers (the more meaningless and confusing, the better!). Windows 7! Perfect!

Any takers on a bet that the follow-on OS will be named something like Windows 2012? See, in four years, the new marketing people to arrive at Microsoft will say that Windows 7 is a bad name because people won’t realize when it becomes obsolete and how old it is.