What’s in a Name? (Premium)

As Windows enthusiasts, we often waste time thinking about---and debating---the relative merits of Microsoft's brand names and product versioning.

I'm as guilty as any of you in this regard. And with over 20 years of experiencing dealing with Microsoft and its ever-shifting whims, I'm perhaps as battle-weary as anyone out there as well. Scarred by Windows Vista, you say? That's just the tip of the iceberg. Let me introduce you to Windows Millennium Edition. And Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Windows for Pen anyone?

We could spend hours on this stuff.

The move from version numbers---3, 3.1 and 3.11---to year numbers---95, 98, 2000---to aspirational names like XP and Vista. And then back to pseudo version numbers like 7 and 8, which were actually versions 6.1 and 6.2, as it turns out. Because Microsoft.

How minor versions of Windows---like 3.1, 3.11, and 8.1---were actually major releases. How things that weren't really even Windows "versions" per se---like Windows 95 SR2 (Service Release 2) and Windows XP with Service Pack 2---were, in fact, major new Windows versions.

How Windows XP was split up, expanded, and niche-marketed into versions for Media Center, Tablet PC, Starter and more. And then all consolidated back again into fewer core SKUs in subsequent product versions.

How antitrust issues drove the creation of such unnecessary things as Windows N (as in "Nobody will want this") and Windows K (as in "Nobody will want this either, K?"). That we are still stuck with. For some reason.

We could talk codenames, like Neptune, Memphis, and Longhorn, all of which were more interesting than the resulting products, not to mention the resulting product versions.

We could talk about the divided and then finally united development strategies of the MS-DOS-based Windows versions and the NT-based Windows versions. About the rise of cross-platform compatibility with Windows NT, about its eventual death to focus on x86, and about its eventual rebirth with the rise of ARM and mobile.

And all that would be fun. In fact, I'm perhaps a bit too into this stuff. A bit too... experienced. The history of this stuff weighs on you after a while. It becomes a blur.

What I'm most interested in, ultimately, is clarity. That we collectively are able to refer to some Windows version and understand immediately what it is.

Windows versions like 95, 98, and 2000 are somewhat clear in that bigger numbers are newer, and those numbers equate to years. But there are issues with such names. Unlike cars, there was never a new version of Windows each year, so someone still running Windows 95 in 1997 might feel that they're out-of-date. And Windows 2000 was based on Windows NT, whereas Windows 95 and 98 were not. Confusing.

Aspirational names like XP and Vista are dumb on many levels---XP, vaguely, was about "experiences"---but you had to be a real insider to understand how these versions related, in time, to the year number versions that came ...