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Comment by TMWNN | Hacker News Reader

> Confusing naming conventions. Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X. Compare to Sony's Playstations 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Names matter enormously.

It all goes back to Microsoft not naming the 360 "Xbox 3" with some lame excuse for why it did so. Yes, everyone would have laughed, but no one would remember or care today that the "Xbox 5" isn't actually the fifth Xbox.

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3, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, 11

It's just not something they're good at.

There was Windows 1.0, 2.0, 286, 386, as well as the 3.11 for Workgroups. And NT 3.1, 3.5, 4.0, 2000 before XP.

> When Adobe finally got around to sprucing up the Macintosh version of Illustrator, they cleverly called the new version Illustrator 88, because it appeared in 1988. You could still buy Illustrator 88 in 1989, though. And in 1990. And even into 1991, when it was finally replaced by Illustrator 3.0. Adobe is not a marketing company.

(From https://www.cringely.com/2013/03/14/accidental-empires-chapt... )

The famous “You can’t send message because user is offline” Ms Office Communicator aka Lync aka Skype for Business aka Microsoft Teams.

What about Nintendo?

   Nintendo Entertainment System
   Super Nintendo
   Nintendo 64
   Gamecube
   Wii
   Wii U
   Switch

doesn't run so much in that awkward zone where the names kind of suggest they denote an order but not really. Not perfect, but still better then MS.

And Super Mario is an NES game?

They had a good excuse for skipping 9: lots of old code did something like if verson.startwith("9") to cover 98 and 98. Because Microsoft, they wanted to keep 20-year-old apps working.

Calling it the Xbox 3 would have been super confusing given it was the follow up to the original Xbox. 360 wasn’t a bad name — at least not compared to the One (which _was_ the 3rd Xbox iteration) and One X followed by the terrible Series S/X nomenclature of the current generation console.

Wouldn't the 360 have been Xbox 2?

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