864
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
864 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
60012 readers
2084 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It's simple: Ain't nobody got time for your bullshit, Microsoft.
I'm on Windows 7. When I saw Windows 8, I said "Guess I'll wait until windows 9".
When I saw Windows 10, I said "Guess I'll wait for Windows 11."
When I saw Windows 11, I said "Guess I'll wait until Windows 12."
Now I'm saying........seriously, did NO ONE else notice they skipped Windows 9??? It went 7-8-10-11.
because calling it Windows 9 would have messed up software that checked if it was running on Windows 95.
People noticed, there were videos about it at the time, we just stopped caring about a number. Apple did the same thing and skipped an iPhone number afaik.
I always just assumed 7 ate 9… I’ll see myself out.
Skipping 9 was due to a combination of marketting ("It's nothing like 8 was, we swear! It's not even 9, it's 10!") and ye olde third party software developers making the poor decision to query the OS name instead of the OS version to set some compatibility stuff.
Oh yeah. The number 9 is superstitious in some East Asian cultures, like the Chinese. Its pronunciation is similar to "unlucky" or "suffering" so people try not to use it, like some buildings skip the 13th floor. But it's not unique. In Japan, the numbers 4 and 7 sound like death so they use alternative pronunciations. Another popular Asian belief similar to Astrology divinates personalities based on blood types.
Since Windows is a global product, MS execs decided to skip the number due to cultural sensitivity. They also wanted to close the gap with the Mac versioning and present it as a big improvement over Win 8, so it was probably a strategic decision for various reasons.
They skipped to 10 because it was going to be the last version of Windows and just be updated from there. Then they scrapped that and released 11.
IIRC that was just a poorly worded statement from a rather unimportant ms employee who really wanted to say "it's the latest version of Windows".
I wonder if 8.1 was intended to be 9 and was never released as such