I once wrote a paper at university about the psychology of version numbers.

You must have had a bloody field day with all the moaning about chrome and firefox climbing the numbers.

Was it published? I'd be very interested to read it.

I would too! Do you happen to work for Microsoft now? Either in Xbox or Windows division?

No sorry, it was a.) philosophy b.) before the internet

Bump for paper if it's published.

Microsoft are at it too with Windows 10. Sneaky beaky ;)

This one is to workaround coders stupidity, despite winapi having functions to give windows version numerically, lots of coders just used regex on windows name... and the regex for "windows 9*" is extremely common

Well couldn't we further push that blame to MS' cockamamie versioning?

I originally wrote "versioning convention" but realized I had to drop convention.