They say every second version of windows is bad. 8 was so bad they skipped straight to 10. But given the current priorities of Windows i'm not holding my breath. They seem to have abandoned the idea that "things should work" as a key principle. 10 was around for an extraordinarily long time but 11 has very few good ideas.
One large contributor to modern Windows's lack of quality is that Microsoft laid off all of its dedicated QA staff in 2014, with the expectation that developers would own the OS's quality themselves, and whatever they miss would get caught by telemetry reports from Windows enthusiasts who sign up to test new versions for free. Getting rid of QA eliminated Microsoft's institutional knowledge of what causes bugs, what areas to look at, etc (invaluable when you're dealing with a 30+ year old codebase where large portions were written prior to automated testing being standard). The free Windows enthusiast testing didn't make up for this because you can't expect them to act like how a QA tester would act.
Of course I don't expect Microsoft to suddenly start caring about product quality. The Windows user base has largely stopped growing, so MBA logic is to spend the bare minimum resources on maintenance and to funnel the existing userbase into growth areas like cloud/AI services.
I remember a different apocrypha for why they skipped from 8 to 10. They wanted avoid OS specific code that conditionally activated from the substring "windows 9" but meant for windows 95 and 98. One would imagine any code like that not being quite as helpful a few decades later.
I wish convenient ideas like that which become memes would die off as I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it, for example I doubt they have alternating teams for every other version. More to the point, from an outside perspective I don't see any change in direction that would drastically change windows for the better within foreseeable future or the timespan a "windows 12" would release.
I must be the only person who remembers everyone shitting on W10 saying it was awful and they were staying on W7 until W11 came around and suddenly we're pretending like everyone loved it
The "every second version" rule may be a meme, but it does not reflect the actual release order of Windows, nor properly count the NT series. It only really applies to sentiment surrounding Windows 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11. But that leaves out Windows 95, most versions of Windows NT, and Windows 2000.
The Windows version numbers are not used often but really do help group Windows into distinct "early vs late" product cycle tiers. They didn't really skip straight to 10, they just named 9 8.1 for reasons.
FridayoLeary|3 months ago
ndiddy|3 months ago
Of course I don't expect Microsoft to suddenly start caring about product quality. The Windows user base has largely stopped growing, so MBA logic is to spend the bare minimum resources on maintenance and to funnel the existing userbase into growth areas like cloud/AI services.
MrLeap|3 months ago
keyringlight|3 months ago
_vqpz|2 months ago
Dwedit|2 months ago
basch|3 months ago
Windows 5.0-5.2 is Win 2000, Win XP, Win XP64.
Windows 6.0-6.3 is Vista, 7, 8, 8.1.
timpera|3 months ago