alt Hacker NewsThey say every second version of windows is bad. 8 was so bad they skipped straight to 10. But given the current priorities of Windows i'm not holding my breath. They seem to have abandoned the idea that "things should work" as a key principle. 10 was around for an extraordinarily long time but 11 has very few good ideas.
Replies
I wish convenient ideas like that which become memes would die off as I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it, for example I doubt they have alternating teams for every other version. More to the point, from an outside perspective I don't see any change in direction that would drastically change windows for the better within foreseeable future or the timespan a "windows 12" would release.
The Windows version numbers are not used often but really do help group Windows into distinct "early vs late" product cycle tiers. They didn't really skip straight to 10, they just named 9 8.1 for reasons.
Windows 5.0-5.2 is Win 2000, Win XP, Win XP64.
Windows 6.0-6.3 is Vista, 7, 8, 8.1.
Windows 11 is pretty great though, it keeps all the good ideas from 10 and improves on them. I don't get the hate.
I remember a different apocrypha for why they skipped from 8 to 10. They wanted avoid OS specific code that conditionally activated from the substring "windows 9" but meant for windows 95 and 98. One would imagine any code like that not being quite as helpful a few decades later.