Microsoft announced its next version of Windows yesterday. Most tech pundits believed Microsoft was going to call the next major release of its OS Windows 9, but Microsoft decided to go with Windows 10 instead.
Why?
Well, the company seemed to suggest that this is a huge release and that it encompasses a broad array of devices from mobile devices to tablets and full-blown desktop computers. As such, it needed a more commanding name that Windows 9. At least that’s the story it went with.
A developer on Reddit Wednesday has a different take that seems to make a lot more sense. We’re not well versed in coding for any version of Windows, but a user named cranbourne believes Microsoft chose Windows 10 instead of Windows 9 because of some underlying code in older applications.
Cranbourne says that “internal rumors” suggest that plenty of third party Windows developers have lines of code with an if-else string that tells the application to perform a specific task if it recognizes a version of Windows that starts with the number 9, such as Windows 95 or Windows 98. In the case of newer apps, that might point the code to do something specifically required for one of those legacy operating systems.
Here’s the direct quote:
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.
True? False? We’re not quite sure, but we do at least know that Microsoft is trying to make this transition to an all-encompassing operating system as easy as possible. This might have just been one way to avoid early headaches, and it seems convincing enough.
Source: REDDIT
