Hey, don't dis MS for having different marketing version vs product versions. OS manufacturers are hostage to the same bad 3rd party coding practices that browsers browsers are with the UA string. You get stuck in a position where changing version number can become actually scary (I recall Safari 2.0.4 having a bunch of issues because the addition of the character "4" broke a wide array of sites, because if your user agent string contains "4" you are netscape 4, and supported document.layers and JavaScript Style Sheets)

If microsoft fired everyone who's ever come with a name for anything and renamed all their stuff after randomly selected Pokémon it would be an improvement.

Like on this chart? https://i.redd.it/n9zkfwj43kn01.jpg

That's nothing. Try working out what version of the .Net framework you need or are running!

We can't forget the nightmare that is Xbox names

I still don't know which is the most powerful one. I remember people buying the previous generation of XBox consoles, because they were confused about the name :D.

Rumor has it that Steve Ballmer wanted people to refer to the new Xbox as "The One" because it was supposed to tie all these capabilities together and be the centerpiece of the living room. Additionally, Microsoft was going through a branding phase of "One" at the time.

As a personal pet peeve of mine, whenever a corporation chooses "One" for its marketing or branding it indicates an uncreative and unoffensive marketing team that can't think of anything more creative to convey a sense of product cohesion.

And Windows 9 got skipped because some Y2K-like software would see "Win9" as Windows 95, or because 9 is unlucky in Japan, or because of marketing, or to distance itself from the flop of Windows 8, or because we all like the number 10.

But you can still understand that Windows 10 is newer than 8 or 8.1, and older than Windows 11. It is what most software companies use, v1, v2, v2.2, etc. Another good way is with year/month, like Ubuntu.

XBox 1 came after XBox 360. But PlayStation keeps it real with 2,3,4,5 came before the egg.

That is why I didn't mention Xbox which is a mess.

The internal version number is just that: an internal number, maybe useful for developers making a check. To quote the great Raymond Chen [0]:

> Poseurs will call Windows versions by their programmatic version numbers. For example, they will call Windows Vista “NT6” and Windows 7 “NT6.1”. Trust me, nobody on the Windows team calls the products by their programmatic version numbers. Whenever anybody says “NT6” I have to go to Wikipedia and look up what they’re actually talking about. If I even care to bother, and usually I don’t.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130507-00/?p=44...