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[13]Home » [14]Windows » Why no Windows 9? The surprising reason

Why no Windows 9? The surprising reason

[15]Dave Farquhar [16]Windows [17]April 7, 2020April 4, 2020 [18]0
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After the hugely popular Windows 7, Microsoft followed up with the
terrible Windows 8, and the only slightly less terrible Windows 8.1.
And then they came out with Windows 10, which, while not as beloved as
Windows 7, certainly was better than 8. But they skipped 9. Why no
Windows 9?

Believe it or not, the reason Microsoft skipped Windows 9 has nothing
to do with Windows 7 or Windows 8. The reason is a decades-old shortcut
that was beyond Microsoft’s control.

The inconsistency in Windows naming catches up with Microsoft

[19]Windows 95 vs 98 Windows 95 vs 98 Why no Windows 9? Because using
that name confused some older programs into thinking they were running
on Windows 95, and that frequently made them break.

Long ago, in the 80s and 90s, we had these things called version
numbers. And Windows followed them. There was Windows 1.0, followed by
2.0, then 3.0, and 3.1. Minor revisions got a point release, and major
new versions incremented the number to the left of the decimal point.
It made sense.

But after Windows 3.1, Microsoft decided it wanted something with more
pizazz. That meant Windows 4.0 wasn’t Windows 4.0. It was Windows 95,
named for the year it was released. And let me tell you, as someone who
worked at Best Buy in the summer of 1995, the jump from Windows 3.1 to
Windows 95 confused no one. And by no one, I mean almost everyone.

Then we had Windows NT 4.0, which was a separate product line, and that
was followed by Windows 98. Then Microsoft got cute and decided Windows
NT 5.0 needed to be called Windows 2000, so the successor to Windows
98, which also came out in 2000, ended up being called Windows Me, for
Millennium Edition, but you weren’t supposed to capitalize the “E.”

Windows Me was terrible, and so was the idea of building Windows on the
MS-DOS kernel, so Microsoft got around to releasing a version of
Windows NT that was equally at home both at work and at home. And
Microsoft named it Windows XP.

XP’s terrible successor was called Vista, so than Microsoft went back
to using version numbers with Windows 7. But XP brings up the shortcut
that developers came up with.

The shorthand that doomed Windows 9

By the 1990s, there was a pretty hefty alphabet soup of Windows
versions, all with their own nuances. Windows 95 was mostly backward
compatible with 3.1, but the new features of Windows 95 made developing
for both systems tricky. Compatibility between Windows 95 and Windows
NT was a different flavor of dicey.

But you couldn’t ignore the huge install base of Windows 95 and 98,
even after XP came out. I can’t emphasize how huge Windows 95 was.
People stood in line to buy it at the stroke of midnight on August 24,
1995. It was Black Friday in August. Over a Microsoft product. I’m not
kidding. It was [20]better than Windows 3.1, but that wasn’t a high
bar. It wasn’t great, but it had buzz.

To make software work on Windows 95 or 98 and Windows NT, sometimes
developers had to do workarounds. So their programs would check what
version Windows reported. If the system reported Windows NT, or Windows
XP, it would behave one way. If it reported Windows 9-something, it
behaved in ways friendly to Windows 95 and 98. Any other answer caused
it to behave like it was running on Windows NT something.

That was great, until 12 years later when a successor to Windows 8 was
supposed to come out. Calling it Windows 9 made those programs act like
they were running on Windows 95, when they needed to behave like they
were running on Windows NT, because XP and everything that came after
was NT-based.

People were mad enough about Windows 8 without Microsoft breaking
stuff. So Microsoft quickly decided to skip Windows 9 and release
Windows 10 right away. That’s why there’s no Windows 9.

Arguably it’s never going to be as beloved as Windows XP and Windows 7
were, but Windows 10 at least caught on better than 8, 8.1 and Vista.

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