I had a chance to give Windows 10 a try Wednesday morning. It is very much- at least in terms of what we can see- similar to Windows 8. Some of the big changes are with regard to how the Modern UI Applications are dealt with. One thing I don’t like is that Window borders have been eliminated. And by “don’t Like” I literally mean that I would stay with 8.1 if that cannot be adjusted. I suspect however that the UI is in a state of flux so that is likely to change in the future.

The Start Menu ought to address the complaints from those who dislike the Start Screen. Thankfully, the Start Screen is actually an option as well, so those who like it aren’t left out in the cold either.

Aside from this, the only other interesting tidbit is the name itself- Windows 10. Basically, they skipped 9. To be fair, however, Windows 7 was chosen pretty arbitrarily too.

To make things worse though, however, there are reddit postings from people posing as Microsoft employees. The claim is that they found “compatibility problems” with programs that tested for Windows 98/95 by using:

This seems plausible to many people.

However, as far as I’m concerned, it’s nonsense. Windows Versions are not retrieved as a string; GetVersionEx() is how the Windows version is tested by applications. The fact is that when Windows 95 and 98 were around there was no way to actually retrieve an OS string of the sort “Windows 95” or “Windows 98”; that data had to be basically decoded directly based on the major/minor/etc. version numbers. That is, 95 was 4.0, 98 was 4.1, etc.

This also ignores that Windows ME was also in the 9x family.

Windows 10’s name was almost certainly chosen for marketing reasons, just like any number of other version skips. There is nothing wrong with skipping versions; for example, when office 95 was released, all office programs jumped to version 7; Before that Word for Windows went from version 2.0 straight to version 6; Visual Interdev went from 1.1 to 6.0, as with Visual J++; etc.

What surprises me most about the rumour is that supposedly intelligent individuals in the tech industry have latched onto it without considering the source; a random bloke on reddit claiming to work for Microsoft who seems to be confusing OS User agents accessed from browsers with the WIN32 API version retrieval capabilities. I can see right through it, and it seems like nonsense even at a glance, so I’m surprised other technical folks seem to be jumping right on board with the rumour without a second thought.

For reference? Windows 10 is actually version 6.4.

Edit Note 12/31/2015- Turns out, that when it went RTM, Windows 10’s version number was changed to 10.0.
 

Vista= 6.0, 7 = 6.1, 8 = 6.2, 8.1 = 6.3, and 10=6.4. This is because Applications retrieve version numbers from the OSVERSIONINFO structure, not from the WMI “OSFriendlyName” value. (which surprisingly contains the friendly name to present to a user- which may also include language translations).