October 14, 2008

MICROSOFT HAS MADE IT official. The new name for the next Windows Operating System will be – take a breath, sit down – Windows 7.Mike Nash, Volish Veep of Windows product management, made the announcement in a blog post last night in which he did his best to explain Microsoft’s previous fuzzy logic in the naming of Windows software. Nash noted that after starting with a logical, if nerdy sounding, version numbering system the company then moved on from names like "Windows 3.11" to naming the OS by its year of release. This worked for Windows 95 through ‘98 until it was deemed impractical by the Redmond Giant, since it didn’t ship new versions every year. Next came what Nash calls "the aspirational monikers" stage in which the Vole tried to be clever, cool and er, random.

Windows Me supposedly stood both for the Millennium and "me, myself and I". It was also a bit crap, so the company quickly binned it and came up with Windows XP in 2001. No one knew what XP stood for [er, eXPerience, wasn't it? Ed.], but it sounded techy and funky, so it stuck. Windows Vista continued in the totally random and meaningless name trend, only remotely useful name-wise for when we all happily shout “hasta la vista” when we chuck it out the, er, Window.