this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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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.
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.
I always just assumed 7 ate 9… I’ll see myself out.
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
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.