As in Windows and Windows Phone Series
“Maybe we’ll get lucky with this number seven.” It was a throw-away comment from Steve Ballmer at the end of Microsoft’s standing-room-only press conference in Barcelona for the official unveiling of Windows Phone 7 Series. Windows Mobile (7?) is dead, long live Windows Phone 7.
Microsoft of course, has been relishing a desktop operating system that is on track and unlike Vista, didn’t get a ton of bad press on its initial release – that would be Windows 7. And now they’re hoping to take the magic of “7” to mobile phones, finally declaring the phone is not a PC, and is no longer based on the Windows CE platform. Windows Phone 7 looks hip and cool, and it’s quite possible that Microsoft has finally got it right! Of course, they could come up with a better name …
But steveb’s comment got me thinking about numbers. How many versions of Windows have there been? Are we really at version 7? I guess it depends when you started to count.
https://www.nirmaltv.com/2009/08/17/windows-os-version-numbers/ has a list of the version numbers of Windows. You get these numbers if you go to the command prompt and type the command “ver”. (There is actually a third number in the output, which is the build number and separate from the version.)
Windows 2000 – if you can remember that far back – was version 5.0, XP was version 5.1, and XP Pro 64-bit was 5.2. The oft-maligned Vista is 6.0, and Windows 7 is 6.1 (not 7.0!). Technically speaking, there are definitely more then seven versions of Windows since Windows 1.0 was released in the mid 1980s. More information on the different versions of Windows is available at https://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2009/10/the_story_on_th.html.
Whether there are seven versions of the phone is another question, partly based on when the Pocket PC stopped being just a PC/PDA and started being a phone. However, even with Windows Mobile, the mobile device was a PDA that happened to also be able to make phone calls.
Changing the name of the phone is just one way Microsoft, written off by many in the mobile phone market, is showing it is changing its approach to phones. And combined with the technology changes, just maybe number seven will help them finally hit a phone out of the ballpark – although unfortunately it’s not expected until sometime this fall.
As a past user of the Pocket PC as well as Windows Mobile (for more on that, see an earlier posting at http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/31378), I have felt Microsoft hasn’t always been in the front when it comes to phone technology. WP7 appears to change that, and I am looking forward to the Windows Phone. Maybe the number seven (regardless of how many versions there have been) will be a lucky number for me – and Microsoft!
