I’m guessing its because ‘9’ pronounced in chinese is the same as ‘dog’ and china is a big market….

Any other guesses?

It got shelved early in dev

Developers taking a little shortcut is probably the reason.

Comment from discussion [account deleted]’s comment from discussion "New Windows Version will be called Windows 10".

“Microsoft dev here, the internal rumours are that early testing revealed just how many third party products that had code of the form

if(version.StartsWith(“Windows 9”))
{ /* 95 and 98 */
} else {
and that this was the pragmatic solution to avoid that.”

what? so technically there was actually a Win9 and its hasn’t just been renamed Win10?

Nine would also be NO in German 🙂

https://searchcode.com/?q=if(version%2Cstartswith(%22windows+9%22)

This is (sceptical look) possibly why. Lazy programming. Besides, “Windows 10” sounds better. Means it’s caught up with OS X.

stu – now that makes plenty of sense.

Any other guesses?

Their whole version history is a mess. You’d think it would be a marketing nightmare for them but lets face it how hard is it to market the choice people make if they’ve decided not to make a choice. 🙂

if(version.StartsWith(“Windows 9”))

See, if you gave a toss you’d not go from 8 to 10, you’d go from 8 to a new version labelling system which you’ve given some thought to and future proofed so issues like that won’t come up again. Or you know you can just decide ‘**** it’. Presumably on the example they’re snookered going from 10 to 11 on the same basis. So windows 50 (or 5) next?

We discussed this on another thread recently. Aside from Spinal Tap-esque marketing which is almost certainly the main reason, I suspect that the other driving force is to allow them to align their desktop product with Windows Phone releases.

It’s a cute idea but I don’t buy the “if Windows version starts with 9” story. a) I’d be stunned if anyone ever detected versions in that way, the internal version of Windows 95 isn’t “95”, it’s “4.00.950” (W98 is 4.10.xx) so you’d say something like “if majorVersion==4”, and

b) even if they did, I can’t for a second imagine that it’s would be such a big deal in 2014 as to influence Microsoft’s product naming.

But yeah. It’s Windows 10 and not 9 because it’s 1 louder.

ok. I’m going back with the dog thing.