Next Windows OS is Windows 7
Hasta la Vista
By Sylvie Barak: Tuesday, 14 October 2008, 10:09 AM
MICROSOFT HAS MADE IT official. The new name for the next Windows Operating System will be – take a breath, sit down – Windows 7.
Mike Nash, Volish Veep of Windows product management, made the announcement in a blog post last night in which he did his best to explain Microsoft’s previous fuzzy logic in the naming of Windows software.
Nash noted that after starting with a logical, if nerdy sounding, version numbering system the company then moved on from names like “Windows 3.11” to naming the OS by its year of release. This worked for Windows 95 through ‘98 until it was deemed impractical by the Redmond Giant, since it didn’t ship new versions every year. Next came what Nash calls "the aspirational monikers” stage in which the Vole tried to be clever, cool and, er, random.
Windows Me supposedly stood both for the Millennium and “me, myself and I”. It was also a bit crap, so the company quickly binned it and came up with Windows XP in 2001. No one knew what XP stood for [er, eXPerience, wasn't it? Ed.], but it sounded techy and funky, so it stuck.
Windows Vista continued in the totally random and meaningless name trend, only remotely useful name-wise for when we all happily shout “hasta la vista” when we chuck it out the, er, Window.
And so now comes Windows 7, a name which supposedly reflects the build numbers as opposed to actual releases. Some think the new naming scheme could be an indication Microsoft wants to speed up release rates and up the competition with Apple, while others think that another bombastic name would take up too much media attention, drowning Vista once and for all.
But Nash has a more straightforward explanation, "Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore 'Windows 7' just makes sense," he says.
We make it about the 25th version of Windows but, as we learned with Word 6.0, Microsoft seems to have a different number if fingers and toes to the rest of us. µ
