Developer claims that third-party apps could incorrectly identify Windows 9 as 95, so Microsoft jumped to Windows 10

Oct 2, 2014 06:05 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft took everyone by surprise two days ago when it announced that its next operating system would be called Windows 10 instead of Windows, Windows 9, or Windows Threshold as some rumors suggested, but the company offered absolutely no explanation for its decision.

Now a Reddit user who claims to be a Microsoft developer says that internal speculation points out that Redmond actually decided to skip Windows 9 and go directly to Windows 10 because of Windows 95.

As weird as it might sound, it appears that Microsoft was afraid of using the Windows 9 designation because of third-party apps that could incorrectly identify the Windows version running on a specific computer.

The developer explains that at this point, there are lots of software solutions out there that check for "Windows 9*" on the target computer, and since this syntax uses a wildcard, the operating system might be identified as an older one.

Odd code in third-party apps

Microsoft wanted to avoid messing up the experience on enterprise computers, as many third-party solutions in this particular side of the industry are still believed to be using old code that would lead to incorrect identification of the operating system.

Here's what the alleged Microsoft developer wrote on Twitter:

"Microsoft dev here, the internal rumours are that early testing revealed just how many third party products that had code of the form:

if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9"))  { /* 95 and 98 */ } else {

and that this was the pragmatic solution to avoid that."

Not the first time when it's happening

Even though you would expect Microsoft to take care of such an important problem, this isn't the first time when the name of the operating system could cause issues with third-party software.

As Engadget writes today, a similar problem occurred more than 10 years ago with Windows 2000 and a number of Pentium processors, but at that point, the issues affected fewer customers.

Microsoft, however, tried to avoid any potential errors in Windows 9, so it gave the operating system a completely new name that would also signal the beginning of a completely new era for the brand.

Company executives suggested that skipping Windows 9 and going directly to Windows 10 was a decision entirely based on the amount of changes that are part of the operating system, so the company wanted to be very clear that its new product brings not only a plethora of changes in terms of looks and features, but also a completely new approach for customers.