Actually, you’re speaking about three product lines: Xboxes, regular old Windows, and Windows NT. Hence also the weird contortions with Windows Me (“Millennium Edition”): They couldn’t name it Windows 2000, because that version had been released half a year earlier. They couldn’t really name it Windows 2001 either, because that would have implied it being better than (or even related to) Windows 2000.
They could’ve sold Windows 2000 as Windows NT 5 and Windows Me as Windows 2000; that would’ve kept the “NT X” versioning scheme for the professional line and the year-based scheme for the consumer line.
But the versioning scheme for the NT line is all kinds of weird in general. Windows 7 is NT 6.1. Windows 8 is NT 6.2. So we’ve established that the product name is independent of the version now. That means that Windows 10 is NT… 10.0. Windows 11 is also NT 10.0.
They could’ve sold Windows 2000 as Windows NT 5 and Windows Me as Windows 2000; that would’ve kept the “NT X” versioning scheme for the professional line and the year-based scheme for the consumer line.
That’s true of course. But iirc, Microsoft itself was on the fence of whether to release Me at all or whether to go straight to what would become XP, the release that united both lines of Windows. I guess that might explain somewhat why the NT product people felt it ok to steal the year-based versioning scheme of DOS-based Windows…?
True, although that made people think that Windows 2000 was the intended successor to Windows 98 – me included. Not that I minded; in my opinion Windows 2000 was straight up better than Windows XP until XP SP2 came out. Anyway, Microsoft spends far too much time getting cute with version numbers.
Actually, you’re speaking about three product lines: Xboxes, regular old Windows, and Windows NT. Hence also the weird contortions with Windows Me (“Millennium Edition”): They couldn’t name it Windows 2000, because that version had been released half a year earlier. They couldn’t really name it Windows 2001 either, because that would have implied it being better than (or even related to) Windows 2000.
They could’ve sold Windows 2000 as Windows NT 5 and Windows Me as Windows 2000; that would’ve kept the “NT X” versioning scheme for the professional line and the year-based scheme for the consumer line.
But the versioning scheme for the NT line is all kinds of weird in general. Windows 7 is NT 6.1. Windows 8 is NT 6.2. So we’ve established that the product name is independent of the version now. That means that Windows 10 is NT… 10.0. Windows 11 is also NT 10.0.
Okay.
That’s true of course. But iirc, Microsoft itself was on the fence of whether to release Me at all or whether to go straight to what would become XP, the release that united both lines of Windows. I guess that might explain somewhat why the NT product people felt it ok to steal the year-based versioning scheme of DOS-based Windows…?
True, although that made people think that Windows 2000 was the intended successor to Windows 98 – me included. Not that I minded; in my opinion Windows 2000 was straight up better than Windows XP until XP SP2 came out. Anyway, Microsoft spends far too much time getting cute with version numbers.