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Comment by mirthflat83 | Hacker News Reader

Yes. They’re copying macOS. Apple decided to change their numbering with Big Sur

This has nothing to do with Apple. Big Sur, released in 2020, cannot possibly have any impact on the naming of Windows that started in 2009 with Windows 7.

Big Sur is when they went from "everything is 10" to 11. The accusation is that moving off of TenVer is following them, as was getting onto TenVer in the first place. And Microsoft was definitely on TenVer. If they were merely incrementing from 7 they wouldn't have skipped 9 and they wouldn't have stuck on 10 nearly as long.

You don't know why they skipped 9? Your argument makes no sense.

The comment above is 100% correct.

Just because Apple left v10 it doesn't absolutely mean Microsoft is just doing it to copy it. You're talking absolute nonsense. Apple doesn't even call it macOS 11 publicly so it doesn't even make sense from a marketing perspective.

They skipped 9 because they thought ten sounded better. Because TenVer, which is what apple was also doing.

Got some other reason in mind? I'm very confident it wasn't backwards compatibility, by the way, so please name a specific program that would have errored if you claim that. Windows lies about its version to old programs.

They skipped 9 because they thought ten sounded better.

This Reddit post says otherwise[1]:

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.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hwlrk/new_wind...

Hi I already addressed that in my post. That code would not fail.

The only plausible version of that I've seen was Java code, and the Java runtime would not have returned "Windows 9" to that API unless deliberately changed to do so.

Not to be rude, but did you skip the second line of my post after reading the first one? Your reply confuses me if you didn't.

Yes I agree that the public reason for skipping Windows 9 doesn't hold. If marketing wanted to release Windows 9, the Compatibility tab is well capable of handling old programs that look for Windows 9*.

Yes because the best way to tell people to run 15-year-old software is to tell them to visit a UI they’ve never seen in their life as opposed to, say, just skip a version number.

No need to visit anywhere, compatibility shims are not only deployed regularly in Windows updates, they're also automatically enabled when heuristics indicate a compatibility issue.

You're missing the point. Big Sur is macOS 11, so Windows is following suit with an 11 of their own.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com