Windows 7

[ilovejedd]

Wasn't that meant to be a bug fix to 98?

Windows ME was supposed to be a bug fix? Oh wait, I'm forgetting, it is standard practice for Microsoft to add a whole lot more bugs than their bug fixes fix.

Still, I'm actually looking forward to Windows 7. They've beta tested it in the guise of Vista for a long while. Hope they make it available via TechNet already.

[fender]

Actually ME was a reactionary freakout because OEM's and hardware manufacturers didn't embrace Windows 2000.

Windows 2000 was supposed to move the consumer segment to the NT Kernel (like XP Did).

People had the same reaction to Windows 2000 then as they have to Windows Vista now. I shook my head at the people telling me how much better 98SE was vs. Windows 2000.

[ilovejedd]

Actually ME was a reactionary freakout because OEM's and hardware manufacturers didn't embrace Windows 2000.

Windows 2000 was supposed to move the consumer segment to the NT Kernel (like XP Did).

People had the same reaction to Windows 2000 then as they have to Windows Vista now. I shook my head at the people telling me how much better 98SE was vs. Windows 2000.

Didn't know that about ME. I thought it was released simply as a successor to Windows 98SE.

I think it was more the name Windows 2000 Professional and the associated price tag that drew consumers away from Win2k. I guess that's probably one of the reasons Microsoft released a Home and Professional edition of XP.

I think it more apt to say people had the same reaction to Windows Vista as they had to Windows XP back in the day. I don't think Windows 2000 even registered in people's minds as an option for a consumer/home-oriented OS. The driver issues, activation, upgraded security policies, program incompatibility, bloat, etc - we had all those with XP, too. I didn't even bother with XP until after SP2 was released and more powerful hardware was available for relatively cheaper.

[reboot]

I get, in this order:
Windows 1
Windows 2
Windows 3
Windows 95
Windows NT
Windows 98
Windows 2000
Windows ME
Windows Server 2003
Windows XP
Windows Vista

That's 11, so whatever is next should be Windows 12?

[liteswap]

The marketing folks at Microsoft are genius and they do whatever works in their versioning. Years ago,in the early days of the PC, when Microsoft Word was at Version 2, WordPerfect spent MILLIONS of dollars advertising their upcoming new version, 6.0. They ran full page ads in all the PC mags touting "6.0" in huge type, while mentioning WordPerfect as the product in a smaller font. About the time they finally released it, a new version of Microsoft Word was released as, you guessed it, Version 6.0. I've always wondered how many people purchased version 6 of Word because they had seen the "Version 6.0" ads for WordPerfect, without realizing the difference.

Up until that point in time WordPerfect was the defacto standard for word processing. I think that Microsoft's "Version 6" marketing strategy probably helped WordPerfect slide into obscurity...

What killed WordPerfect was the close alliance between Microsoft's OS and Office apps divisions at the time everyone was switching to Windows. So Word was released first and the first Windows version worked well with Windows. WordPerfect (sadly) displayed neither of those attributes - I was a WP user....

<sorry - off-topic!>

[SJR]

It's Version 7 of Windows NT which doesn't include MS-DOS based versions of Windows. The sequence is I believe:

Windows NT 3.1 (NT Version 3.1)
Windows NT 3.5 (NT Version 3.5)
Windows NT 3.51 (NT Version 3.51)
Windows NT4 (NT Version 4)
Windows 2000 (NT Version 5)
Windows XP (NT Version 5.1)
Windows Server 2003 (NT Version 5.2)
Windows Vista (NT Version 6)
Windows Version 7

Hope this helps.

[reboot]

So that means that they're simply ignoring the "mistake" versions, like 95, ME, et al