We should adopt this as an industry.
That's just so simple it's genius.
"That 2020 motherboard won't run USB 2025"
We really need this.
Please Intel, Broadcom, Nvidia, etc. folks reading this. Please.
Look at how slow USB-C has been to come on. Look at how 802.11ax has gone nowhere. Or how Intel has been dragging its feet with PCIe4.
802.11ax is WiFi 6. We can assume it will get somewhere once it gets a fully fledged launch.
But since USB won’t actually Change until 2030 it doesn’t matter, right?
Absolutely agreed.
In the interest of efficiency, we should probably also truncate it to fewer digits.
Perhaps 2.
Since we're in the first quarter of a new century, this won't cause an issue for a long time.
It's probably CalVer: https://calver.org/
As other commenters have said though, manufacturers probably don't want consumers to have a good idea of just how obsolete their equipment is. The current a|c|b|g|n alphabet soup is working out just fine for selling lots of equipment.
Also, there are likely to be actual manufacturing and engineering reasons why Wifi 2021 will only become widely available during 2024, and those are hard to get across to consumers too.
The rise of this sort of branding is very intentionally to make comparison possible, as you don't really know anything about the Ultra Frequency Crystals and why their competitor doesn't have them, just buy whichever ones have flames and a dragon on the box and it'll work itself out.
The other half or more of the market already doesn't understand the existing versioning scheme. If you print the version in small print on the back of the box, they'll be no worse off. Or simply elide the first two digits and they won't know it's a year-based scheme.
And who's to say they can't do a yearly release cadence? WiFi 20, WiFi 21, ...
Our 2020 router supports wifi 018
Their commitment to it even for servers is only half-hearted.
Windows Server 2003 (April 2003)
Windows Server 2003 R2 (December 2005)
Windows Server 2008 (February 2008)
Windows Server 2008 R2 (October 2009)
Windows Server 2012 (September 2012)
Windows Server 2012 R2 (October 2013)
Windows Server 2016 (September 2016)
Windows Server 2019 (October 2018)Worked for Microsoft... for a while.
And then later, lazy programmers forced it to skip Windows 9.
People ruin everything.
'Marketeers' ruin everything.
I read (I think on HN) that lazy programmers would test whether the environment was Windows 95 through 98 by only checking for "Win9" or something similar, rather than a list of strings. Thus, if Microsoft released an actual "Win9," many programs would think they were running on Windows 95.
Microsoft and Apple and others also prefer to skip 9 for the international marketing reason that 9 is a very evil number by superstition in most of Asia, like how some of the west believes 13 to be unlucky and things like elevators tend to skip 13 in the US/Europe.