According to the official Windows Vista Blog, Microsoft has decided that, in order to keep things simple, the OS code-named “Windows 7” will officially be called “Windows 7.” Sayeth the poster: “since we began development of the next version of the Windows client operating system we have been referring to it by a codename, “Windows 7.” But now is a good time to announce that we’ve decided to officially call the next version of Windows, “Windows 7.”” Of course, this introduces a major issue – if the version number of Windows 7 is, in fact, 6.1 or 6.2, as many expect, how can you call it Windows 7? And if the kernel version is updated to version 7, how many apps and drivers might fail due to poor version checking? I’m sure the upcoming PDC and WinHEC events will shed some light on this.
Windows 7 Officially Named… Windows 7
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Adam Scheinberg
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Excellent choice. Simple, to the point, and no weird marketing bla bla. This is what I mean when I say that the people working on Windows 7 are not the people who worked on Vista.
Incidentally, the “7” is a nice glyph for logo making (like Apple’s X)
Let’s wait and see. Vista had a lot of cool things going for it in the first year of its development.
The first 80% of any software are always fun and games.
The last 20% are the hard stuff. And MS has not the best track record on getting those done in time.
Just one blog with nice posts does not convince me otherwise.
The E7 blog is the best thing Microsoft could have done to excite me for Windows 7. If you read it, it actually sounds like the engineers are getting direct feedback.
Yes, but the blog always stops short of actually answering any of the said feedback. For each of the topics they’ve covered, they’ve given points 1. 2. – the history of the feature, and what the identified problems are; but they leave out point 3. – what the solution in Windows 7 is going to be. They only say that things will be easier, clearer and better. The same smoke they were wafting with Vista.
The only thing that’s given me hope so far is the only thing that exists as actual evidence and not merely floral wording from the engineers – the leaked screenshots of WordPad and Paint.
So, first Microsoft gets a load of crap because they were too eager to blabber and write on and on about what might end up in Vista – and now they’re getting a load of crap because they’re being a lot more careful with making promises?
Seriously. Where will it end?
As Adam said, the E7 blog is great. It gives a lot of insider info, usage data, the areas and problems they’re working on, some solutions they’re considering, and you can give feedback via the comments – and then, a few days later, they respond to that feedback with a follow-up post.
Sure, it ain’t no mailing-list bikeshed debates (if some of you were to actually read open-source m-l’s, like I do, you’d understand the frustration), but it’s better than nothing.
Microsoft showed a lot, and promised a lot for Vista (then Longhorn) in 2003 – but then failed to deliver anything even approaching that.
I’m asking they SHOW what they’re actually doing (instead of just talking about the problems and avoiding the answers), and then DELIVER it. Like every other OS. The early Tiger demos (CoreImage/Video) were every bit as impressive as Longhorn, but Apple actually delivered it.
As Microsoft has promised they will do… at PDC.
“Seriously. Where will it end?”
Dead simple. It will end when MS actually delivers exciting features! As long as they don’t, customers will always complain, wether they babbled about it or not.
And for a reason!
Well I do enjoy reading the blog, mainly due to me being interested in OS development. But the name announcement is pretty much the least interesting blog entry for me so far and while it’s certainly news I fail to see why it would be the cause of any excitement. I mean, what’s in a name? That which we call Vista, by any other name would smell just as bad.
Wow, first post.
The problem is that the version number doesn’t convey anything to anyone. To developers, the internal version is likely still to be 6.x and the version number of 7 means absolutely nothing to end users given the naming scheme of Windows since Windows 95. Vista was a departure again. At least Apple have stayed consistent, called Mac OS OS X, given each version a proper internal version number for people who care and given each release a nice cat name for everyone else.
Is it? I don’t see where the progressive and logical naming scheme comes from.
I don’t think the “nice glyph” remark is linked to logical considerations. It might merely mean that a 7 is a nice shape to make pretty pictures with.
What strikes me is that Intel also has their i7. Are we going to see a lot of 7 products from different vendors. Like the XP moniker when MS came out with Windows XP?
by the time Windows “7” ships intel will be phasing out i7 and be releasing their next gen stuff.
lol no, i7 will still be a live product when windows 7 comes out in a year.
A year?? i7 may be around, but I seriously doubt Windows 7 will be!
Not bashing, just a historical trend with no prior precedence to the contrary ( i.e. : they ain’t ever got done on time… except once… because they bought the software from the Seattle Software Co. ).
–The loon
Oddly, I’d rather enjoy seeing Microsoft do a good job on Windows 7. Problem is that no single OS can be the best at everything.
“Always with the compromises.” – Zoidberg.
all I’m going off is:
Bill Gates, speaking before the Inter-American Development Bank in April 2008, said “Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version” when referring to Windows 7
It’s not really of any use marketing-wise, and doesn’t mean anything as a glyph, unless you can keep some sort of running theme going through future versions of Windows to link them all together. However, that’s something that Microsoft are no good at really and they’ve put no thought into it whatsoever. You can have a go at Apple about lots of things but their OS X cat naming scheme is brilliant. It produces nice glyphs, glyphs that mean something to people via their continuity and memorable names.
Microsoft needed to break with previous naming schemes, and with Vista, by coming up with something fresh, memorable and continuous. That isn’t it.
My big problem with the car scheme and its usage is you cannot tell which order they come in. Is Leopard newer or older than Jaguar? No way to tell and as a non fan boy casual OS X user I cannot remember.
These guys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ubuntu_releases
… only got it right after their fourth try. For their first two releases, you have to go by the numbering rather than the alphabetic order.
You wouldn’t think it would be that hard, would you?
Sure. KDE 7.0 will also be released by that time. Kidding.
its NOT a good name, for the simple reason that it isnt windows7 – its windows6.1.
vista is windows6. this version is an incremental upgrade to vista just like xp was an incremental update to windows2000. and just like xp is windows5.1 this version should be named windows6.1
calling it windows7 is the worst possible name as its entirely misleading on several levels.
/stone
the internal number scheme does affect the fact that this is the seventh version of windows to be released.
I too think this is a good name, i never liked the XP or Vista mokia. It’ll be nice if they could get into the logical apple method of numbering, i.e. SP1 could be 7.1, etc..
Im just glad they didn’t use the year method as before, a la windows 2000. As this is well and truly in the windows server arena, Windows 2008, Exchange 2007 etc..
Edited 2008-10-14 15:49 UTC
It worked out OK for Java 2 Solaris 7. Only the nerdiest of computer nerds will even care that the new numbering system is ‘wrong’. 99.95% of their target audience won’t care in the slightest about internal numbering or how “misleading” it is.
If you really think that Windows 7 “is the worst possible name” that they could come up with then you really need to get out more.
[quote]Of course, this introduces a major issue – if the version number of Windows 7 is, in fact, 6.1 or 6.2, as many expect, how can you call it Windows 7?[/quote]
You do realize that you are talking about Microsoft’s marketing department, don’t you? Can you think of the last time they made sense? I’d finger “Windows for Workgroups” myself.
[rantmode]
I bet Windows 7 will be better than Linux managing it’s problems with drivers…
[/rantmode]
😛
Ok, in 5 years, around 2013 I’ll call your bet.
Upps, you lose!
Not unless things change very radically in that time.
Linux does a truly horrible job of dealing with drivers for new hardware. And I’m not talking about drivers for new hardware not existing, or vendors not providing the specs, or anything like that. That is a separate discussion.
I’m talking about the fact that the prescribed course for any user with a piece of new hardware is to upgrade to the latest version of their distro. And if the latest stable version does not support the hardware, then using the latest beta, or even alpha version of the distro may be required. I had to move to an early alpha version of my distro of choice just to get SATA working on my Intel G43 chipset motherboard. That is a totally brain-dead driver management policy. The truly horrifying thing is that some within the community apparently think that policy is fine and dandy.
Edited 2008-10-14 19:43 UTC
You don’t have to do that. You can backport drivers, in case you didn’t know. Not to mention that all you need are the kernel headers.
I installed the newest e1000e driver off of the sourceforge page when the whole fiasco of that happened with the .26 / .27 kernels and it worked flawlessly.
So this whole “Having to upgrade the whole distribution” is plain poo.
Explain that to mom. World Domination will remain forever out of reach if your attitude prevails.
Edited 2008-10-14 20:16 UTC
Drivers for new hardware are perfectly fine to presume a newer version of the kernel. especially for motherboards. Think about it for just one second, and pehaps you can see why.
BTW … being reluctant to upgrade your OS version is Windows-think. With Windows, it will cost you $$$. With Windows, you are liable to run into issues with incompatibilities with versions (think … get Windows 98 to get support for USB … think … directx 10 comes with Vista only … starting to get the picture? Think … forced upgrades.).
With Linux … why not be up-to-date?
Edited 2008-10-15 02:01 UTC
lemur2 asked…
Because sometimes stability matters?
Please note, the OP in the conversation chain is talking about having to install bleeding edge beta or even alpha quality software simply in order to have full hardware support for his hardware.
Of course, using your examples above with Win9x and Vista, the advantage of Linux is you can compile a kernel to get your hardware to work. Try doing that with a proprietary OS…
–bornagainpenguin
Edited 2008-10-15 03:31 UTC
If you are going to bolt bleeding edge beta or even alpha quality hardware into your machine, you may well have to put up with very recent and not-yet-well-tested versions of software.
That’s life. Deal with it.
Precisely.
Edited 2008-10-15 03:53 UTC
lemur2 said…
We’re not talking about hardware that is bleeding edge, just the realities behind having to develop drivers independently and usually without the support of manufacturers.
I don’t think its fair to call retail hardware bleeding edge or alpha unless there are issues with the actual hardware independent of the drivers used in whichever OS.
So do I understand the realities of the situation, I just think it sucks and people shouldn’t be so hard on those who find themselves stuck due to the unavailability of tested and stable drivers.
Its actually pretty cool that as many people put up with the current situation as do…
–bornagainpenguin
Nice try, Lemur. But while I was dealing with hourly lockups of an alpha version of a Linux distro, Windows users were enjoying stable performance from their new Intel-based motherboards. (Your implied claim that Intel sells alpha quality hardware to the public makes you seem pretty desperate to come up with a defense.)
This statement neatly embodies the reason that in the last 16 years(!) Linux has gotten almost nowhere on the consumer desktop.
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10
And that situation will continue as long as such an attitude is prevalent.
Fortunately for Linux, the old guard is slowly but surely being marginalized by new players who have a clue as to real users’ needs.
As to concerns about upgrades being “Windows-think” as you call it… when are some Linux advocates ever going to get it through their heads that one’s *time* has value? And why waste the time to upgrade to a shiny (and possibly unstable) new Linux version just to get what XP gives you (in this case, in more stable form) with a simple driver update?
I’m a Linux advocate. Majorly. But your defense of our current driver management policy is off the deep end, and makes it appear that you will go to any length to try to defend “The Linux Way”.
Edited 2008-10-15 04:49 UTC
Its alpha quality hardware if it doesn’t have a working driver on release.
A Windows-only driver is not acceptable. Motherboards for IBM-PCs and derivatives are not designed to run only OS from one vendor. Linux, Mac OSX and Windows all run on x86 and x86_64 architecture machines.
Even with Windows … if you get new hardware, newer than the OS with which you try to run it … then problems may well be evident.
This is not a valid argument to put forward against Linux. If there is a working Windows version of drivers, and not a working Linux version (even though it should be more or less only a slight adjustment to the code and a recompile to provide that) … then that is an argument against that Intel motherboard, and not against Linux at all.
Windows Vista driver problems are, after all, always blamed on the hardware manufacturer, and never on Microsoft.
What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
Steve, I do understand where your frustration is coming from. I truly do. My laptop has a weird and cheap webcam that is not supported by any driver at the moment (although there is a driver in the earlier stages of development that reportedly works for some people) and sometimes one just wants to use Skype with videoconferencing like everybody else. However, Lemur’s point still stands: as you are well aware the OSS community has limited resources when it comes to code or maintain drivers for new pieces of hardware, specially considering that most manufacturers don’t take the trouble of publishing the hardware specs so that one can take them and write drivers without having to reverse engineer anything or to allocate the resources to write and maintain the driver themselves.
If I were a driver developer, I obviously would want to get the latest kernel and follow closely the mailing lists to make sure that I will not be using a deprecated API or something along these lines due to the ever changing nature of the kernel API – which can be a source of frustration for some in itself – and that often means that I will be playing with beta or even alpha code. And it is obvious that my code probably will not tap into everything that the device might be able to do initially as no specs were made available to begin with! Yes, it is frustrating but that how it is.
To me, it is a huge deal that there are some kind souls out there willing to spend the time required to backport some bleeding edge hardware drivers to older kernel releases, even those on the distros’ payroll, as it takes a lot of effort and dedication to do it. Most of us have not paid for this software and therefore are not entitled to anything so I’m grateful when someone takes the time to do it.
Unfortunately, our choice of OS leads to this sort of problem and no amount of wishful thinking can change that and blaming this or that group of people not only is unfair but is not helpful at all. One really has to take hardware support into account when deciding to use non-Windows systems. If you REALLY need some hardware functionality that is only available on Windows and nothing but Windows, then by all means go use Windows!
And while we’re on that subject, your post is showing signs of a disturbing trend that has been growing a lot on Linux land lately that is the attitude of dismissing the hard work of the people that brought us Linux as we know it in the first place, the “old guard” as you call them. The hipsters came on board and they want to shake things and make them better because “they know what end users needs” and then out of a sudden they know better than the people that worked hard to build the whole thing from the ground up until now. Perhaps most people will not use xfig, xclock or the other old xutils and countless Athena and Motif/Lesstif apps these days but these tools served us well in the past and have their place on the UNIX ecosystem.
Linux does not need to dethrone Windows to become successful. Anything that is not Windows will not satisfy its current userbase and these people will not be satisfied until Linux become a free Windows clone at which point the things that got most of us into Linux in the first place will be slowly taken away.
It just needs to reach some critical mass so that it will be treated as an equal to other mainstream OSes by the industry players and hardware manufacturers. THEN these things will begin to change. Think about it.
No. I don’t think you do. Because you seem to think that my frustration is about *my* Intel motherboard not working well with Linux, even under 2.6.27 and the latest version of Xorg. My frustration derives from the fact that Linux clearly has a driver and driver management problem, and the community wants to play the “Three Wise Monkeys” regarding this and other problems that Linux has.
BULLSHIT!
There really isn’t any other word that covers it. We’re not talking about your crappy no-name webcam. I made that quite clear in my original post.
We’re talking about the SATA controller of an Intel G43 chipset, released in June, specs released ahead of that, by a company which has done absolutely everything that the community has said for years is all that a hardware company needs to do to get good Linux support. They’ve even gone beyond by hosting the development site and assigning engineers to participate in the FOSS driver projects for their hardware. And Linux is *still* way behind windows on support for this hardware. This is the absolute optimum test case for whether or not the Linux community’s claims and promises hold up; For whether the driver development and distribution model works. And it is clear that they do not.
I continue to be amazed at just how far some Linux apologists will go to defend the indefensible. And to defend that which should not be defended. It is not helping Linux.
Decide whether you care about the future of Linux or not. If you do not, then by all means continue to turn a blind eye to its shortcomings and defend it no matter what. If you *do* care, then you might start considering its obvious shortcomings and how things might be improved. Because you can bet that consumers who don’t care one way or the other about OSes, which is about 99% of home users in the world, give or take a bit, are going to go with what works best for them. And right now that is *clearly* Windows. And after 16 years that is our fault. I don’t like it. But ignoring the fact, as some Linux advocates are so keen to do, does not change the reality.
You can live in your fantasy world. Or you can live in the real one. But if you choose fantasy, declining to acknowledge the real one, don’t complain when the real world intrudes.
Edit:
I mentioned the “Three Wise Monkeys” earlier. I went to Wikipedia to refresh myself on the topic, and encountered this wonderful image of a wood carving depicting them:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0b/Threewisem…
Note that the monkeys in this depiction are *helping each other* to avoid hearing, seeing, and speaking of the obvious problems surrounding them. This is most relevant. Because I see the members of the Linux community performing that function for other members.
Edited 2008-10-15 16:50 UTC
[/q]
And how is that Intel failing to release a suitable driver for your hardware is Linux’ fault? As I said, one can argue that the lack of a stable kernel ABI might be holding us back in that regard and that’s a heck of a good point, but if that means that Linus will keep pushing enterprise grade features into the kernel at a reasonable pace and the current maintainers can keep their drivers up to the snuff with little effort, I’m all for it and don’t remember seeing you complain last time this was raised…
I am not trying to defend anything, I’m just stating things as they are. You’re the one that’s trying to come up with solutions to these problems, as if it hasn’t been tried countless times before. Get real!
I really beg to differ here, mate. Mac OS X is by most accounts a very successful consumer product and they take pride for being different of Windows. Difference here is that Mac OS X has tons of cash in the bank and a lot of hype going for it.
I do care about Linux and don’t give a shit about most Windows users. How about that? If Windows works best for them, then I don’t see why they cannot stay with Windows (like my wife chooses to do, for instance). What’s the point of turning Linux into a free Windows clone that will be forever trying to catch up with the real thing? For those of us for whom Windows cannot meet our expectations though, I’m glad that there are Mac, Linux and other options out there that can be shaped in a way that satisfy our needs. If some Windows users wish to follow and are willing to learn a little in the process, that’s OK. Ubuntu has managed to do that, if anything.
Listen, pal. Nobody is ignoring problems, “living in the fantasy world” as you say, perceived or otherwise. I think that most reasonable people acknowledge the problems that you described – I face some of them myself from times to times – but there are no easy answers here. If you have a magic wand that’s going to make it all go away, then be my guest. Mark Shuttleworth has a lot of both money and momentum going for him but regardless he has experienced only moderate success trying to steer Linux into a more consumer-friendly realm so I wonder what one with less resources can accomplish.
I can understand someone that just started to use Linux and does not fully understand the dynamics of its ecosystem going into rant mode and shout some gibberish but as a long time Linux user, you should know better.
I guess that my point is that if you are going to use Linux, then purchase hardware intended to be used with Linux (funny is that this is exactly the same advice that you gave to kaiwai when he started to badmouth Linux for not supporting his wireless card some time ago and now came up with this. Go figure!) the same way that Mac users have to purchase hardware intended to be used with Mac OS X and keep in mind that spankin’ brand new hardware most likely will only be fully supported under Windows and later on the others, if it comes to that at all. BUT if you’re willing to take certain risks, then you will know that support for your hardware might be under development on newer and unstable iterations of the kernel.
But we’re going way too off-topic here so I will refrain from responding on this thread any longer…
Edited 2008-10-15 18:18 UTC
I was wondering how they would call it. I couldn’t sleep until now. So they decided they will call it ‘Windows 7’ … Wow! What a BIG event! They must have been very busy for a long time working on that name! We have reached a huge milestone here, haven’t we? After the release of Mandriva 2009, python 2.6, linux kernel 2.6.27 and OpenOffice 3.0, OSNews covers the name of Windows 7! What exciting times! “Windows 7”, that sounds like the future is here! Do we know the name of the next Notepad? I can’t wait to know its name, this is so important to me! I can’t use it if they don’t call it notepad 7. I really want to know… please!
Edited 2008-10-14 13:38 UTC
“Hindenburg”, “Titanic”, and “Amelia Earhart Edition” were all previously trademarked. And “Mary Celeste” was rejected by marketing due to its Dalek association.
Edited 2008-10-14 13:44 UTC
Unfortunately, I can’t moderate that as funny, but funny it certainly is.
Windows 666? They could have fire in the shape of three 6s.
Edited 2008-10-14 14:11 UTC
The advertising possibilities are endless (eternal?), especially for an October release. This family just got Windows 666 Home Server:
http://tinyurl.com/4ddejm
Edited 2008-10-14 14:47 UTC
Steve, if you are going to troll, at least try to make it less obvious.
And I believe that this article is about a new Windows name?
😉
What name would this be?
http://sourceforge.net/projects/notepaddotnet/
😉
it’ll be called Notepad NT, (“new technology” for those that just came in) because it’ll support text files longer than 64Kb.
At least they got the name right.
7 is a nice number. As a name, it’s simple and to the point. It’s the 7th Windows.
I still don’t know WTF “Vista” is supposed to convey. “Longhorn” was a way cooler name. Microsoft code names are always way better than the real name.
I never really liked “Longhorn” because it doesn’t sound particularly high-tech and the internal logos looked like a sign of bovine extinction rather than a new and exciting product.
Well… I didn’t criticize. Because it doesn’t get much worse than this:
http://labor-liber.org/images/gnu-head.jpg
Maybe they could learn from Ubuntu’s animal naming scheme..? If Longhorn = Vista, the improved (fixed?) Longhorn could be named something like Windows Livable Longhorn edition?
Am I the only one whose lost nearly all enthusiasm for new Microsoft releases these days?
I used to at least follow stuff when XP was still known as Whistler and actually liked the Watercolours theme back in the earlier betas.
I even followed Vista quite a bit back when it was still known as Longhorn and found myself entranced by the various screenshots and videos of the Operating System, despite my decision to start moving to Linux at the earliest possibility.
Having used Vista quite a bit at the store and while working on people’s computers and having verified for myself just how broken the OS is I simply can’t seem to get excited about Windows 7 the way I used to about earlier Microsoft releases.
Is anyone else feeling this way? Did you used to be all geeked out about the newest and latest features in Windows (stuff like .Net, WinFS, Monad) and now just can’t force the same kind of enthusiam you once had?
–bornagainpenguin
Yes, you are. The rest of us lost nearly all enthusiasm back when they touted Windows 3.0 and MS-DOS 6 as cutting edge. 😛
No, you’re not alone. Waaaaay back …I once downloaded a beta of what would become Windows98 – Memphis….over a dialup connection! It took 5 days with the connection being dropped deliberately by my ISP every 2 hours. Oh, the thrill of loading that up on my 486 laptop with 8mb of RAM. Sure, it ran like a pig with chronic arthritis…but it was ‘state-of-the-art’ baby!
I’ve been using various flavours of Linux as my primary OS for going on 6 years now and rarely give Windows a second glance. That’s not to say they don’t do some good stuff…I’m just not a member of their target market anymore.
jack_perry joked…
LOL. I don’t think I was even playing with Windows seriously at that point. Maybe I was only using WordPerfect Dos at that time? I forget, it was a while ago, but I think at that time I was much more of an end-user.
wakeupneo reminisced…
I think I may have seen that one floating around at one of the other forums I’ve been a member of. I never ran it on my desktop, but I do remember being enamored by the IE4 desktop update when it first came out. I eventually moved into the 98Lite camp though and became all about deintergrating IE from the desktop, even though I still liked IE when used in one of the many shells for it allowing tabs and ad-blocking.
wakeupneo commented…
Ditto here. I may still run Windows XP on my entertainment box but its been Linux all the way on my laptops for awhile now. Especially on my Eee901, now that I’ve licked the battery life issues with eee-control-tray!
–bornagainpenguin
Yep big time my friend.
I find that I can’t get excited anymore. Their software has reached the point where its over complicated and each upgrade is a performance hog.
The magic is gone, if it was ever really there to begin with.
I still do windows for a living, but I don’t get excited over it anymore.
what about Windows SeVen i like it better this way 🙂
I know i am going ot walk into a local best buy and see the sales people pushing OSX on noob computer users and citing this as their reasoning, “well the new version of windows is called windows 7. Windows 7 is good and all but apple is on OSX, and thats 3 higher so you know its better.” *purchase*
And if the kernel version is updated to version 7, how many apps and drivers might fail due to poor version checking?
What a great example of why proprietary software sucks. If Linux, or FreeBSD, or some other open source OS decided to change their versions to A, B, C, or jump up a thousand to Linux Kernel 1002.6.27 how long would it take for drivers to be updated.
If you’re at the mercy of proprietary drivers, you’re doing something wrong.
If an operating system somehow tries to alleviate things like this where “oh, XYZ driver is asking for the version of the kernel… report the older version so that it’ll work”, then the operating system is doing something wrong.
It will lead to that. Microsoft has done it before where they explicitly check for certain processes known to not work on newer versions of it’s OS and then it runs in some legacy mode, just so someone doesn’t have to recompile a new version. This is wrong. Let the shit break, and have them fix it.
If Microsoft has an ounce of sense, it will learn another lesson from the Vista fiasco and consolodate Windows 7 back to two versions: Professional / Enterprise and Home / Personal. It was misleading and outright gouging to produce six variants of Vista. Everyone wants Ultimate but most OEM’s shipped Home Basic, which was useless or Home Premium (or maybe if one was lucky, Vista Business.) Better yet, Microsoft should simply produce one lean, fast core OS with strong security features and let businesses and home users add the superfluous features a la carte like Aero glass & other themes, Media center, drive encryption, etc. via separate PLUS! packs. This way, users can tailor the OS to their specific needs and not waste space or resources on features they don’t want or need. In my opinion, Microsoft’s biggest mistake over the years is trying to cram everything but the kitchen sink into each new Windows release while still trying to maintain backward compatibility with DOS!
They are calling it Windows 7 not because it’ll be a version 7 kernel (it’s just kind of a re-release of Vista’s), but because as the blog says “it is the 7th release of Windows” which I think makes sense, what does not make sense is from what point they are counting it as the 7th… by naming only the consumer versions you end up with ~10 (or 8 if you want to remove NT and 2000). The 7 will be just a pretty name IMO, it’s really ambiguous from every other perspective. All said, having Vista all over again is disappointing to say the least.
1. Windows 1.x
2. Windows 2.x
3. Windows 3.x
4. Windows NT
5. Windows 95
6. Windows 98
6 1/2. Windows ME
7. Windows 2000
8. Windows XP
9. Windows Vista
10. Windows 7???
just to clerify what you said, for those who don’t know about the kernel numbering in windows. if you have ever been into safe mode you will notice up at the top of xp it says 5.1 and vista it says 6.0
that is because these are the version numbers behind windows. though i thought windows 7 was actualu going to be 6.1. much like xp was 5.1 to windows 2000’s 5.0.
Edited 2008-10-14 16:05 UTC
It’s because these are the *NT* kernel version numbers, not Windows per se.
Anybody familiar with Linux should have no problem accepting that the kernel has a different version nr. than the distro. I mean Linux is at 2.6.something while Fedora is at version 9.
From the linked blog post, the guy explains that they got away from naming Windows after years because they don’t keep to a yearly release schedule. Okay, that makes sense.
Then he mentions that they wanted to avoid coming up with another “aspirational” name for Windows 7, because, in Microsoft’s view, Windows 7 is delivering on their “aspirations” for what they had in mind for Windows Vista in the first place.
And so, Windows 7.
— Here’s my comment: Why not name it “Windows Buena Vista”? You know. As in, “Windows: Good Vista”.
At the very least, they’re consistent in their inconsistencies.
Disney might have a problem with anyone else using Buena Vista as a trademark.
…Like Microsoft couldn’t buy out Disney?
This reminds me of the character brought on to the TV series “Married with Children” when it was failing in the ratings.
“Windows 123”. So easy, a child can do it!
Windows 666 – Don’t buy and sell without it!
This is fantastic news. I’m so overwhelmed with joy about the new name of Windows, I told my wife not to cook dinner tonight and order pizza.
I am also excited about the 7 different versions of Windows 7 that’s going to come out.
Windows 7 – 3rd World Country Edition
Windows 7 – Basic Edition For Folks Livin’ In The Hood
Windows 7 – Basic Edition
Windows 7 – Home Edition
Windows 7 – Professional Edition
Windows 7 – Ultimate Edition
Windows 7 – Enterprise Edition
calling it windows7 is the worst possible name as its entirely misleading on several levels.
It is obvious you have never worked in marketing before or associated with a lot of marketing folks. Bigger numbers are better in marketing. It is a perceptual thing; it makes people feel like they are getting their money’s worth. Following software engineering standards is not part of the marketing world.
Edited 2008-10-14 21:16 UTC
Finally someone knows about the subject.
Exactly, in fact I was a bit surprised they didn’t name it:
“Windows 12, We went one higher than 11!”
then they can call it Seven-of-nine…
Okay, lame joke I know. But at least the default wallpapers might be more interesing… =)