The Deal With Windows 7
There’s some fuzz about the fact somebody leaked from an MGX session that Microsoft is working on Windows 7. Some people think it’s a big deal, but in fact the story behind is quite easy. Internally Microsoft has always been using codenames for projects that were under development. Windows 7 is actually the following version after Vista and was previously called Vienna. For the Windows products, they’ve never used numbers until now - as opposed to Office, of which version 12 (2007) has been released.
The guy that previously ran the Office projects (Steve Synofsky) is now on the Windows project, and decided that it would be better to have product numbers instead of codenames, to avoid confusion since the codenames tend to be changed in the course of the dev track. So, Vista would’ve been version 6, and Vienna then became Windows v.7.
That’s it. Can’t really think of a reason why this would cause such a buzz.
One thing is that we will skip version 13 of Office, because 13 is an unlucky number. So the next release of Office will be Office 14 instead of Office 13.
July 22nd, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Windows used to use numbers early on. NT had version numbers, until it became 2000. And wasn’t there a Windows 3.0 somewhere?
July 22nd, 2007 at 8:18 pm
already clear :)
And Windows 7 will be released on 07.07. ;)
July 23rd, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Absolutely Jason! And I can’t see why people make such a big deal about it. Isn’t it normal you work on the follow-up of your next product as soon as you released the first one? I’m just glad we got rid of the codenames. It makes things more easy :-)
July 23rd, 2007 at 4:38 pm
I agree. I wasn’t sure what all the “hype” was about either. I guess it was a slow “news” week. :)
July 30th, 2007 at 8:14 am
Actually, Windows has always used numbers, just never as codenames. Windows 1 and 2 were simple DOS shells. Windows gained popularity in version 3. Windows NT 4.0, Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows Me were different variations of Windows 4. Windows 5.0 was 2000, 5.1 was XP and 5.2 was Server 2003. Windows 6 is Vista and Server 2008. Windows ‘Vienna’ will be Windows 7.