• 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 means that Windows 10 is NT… 10.0. Windows 11 is also NT 10.0.

        And likely windows 12 as well…

        And versions of windows 10/11 have the same issue too… v1507, because it was released in July 2015
        v1511, Nov 2015
        v1607, Aug 2016
        v1703, April 2017
        v1709, Sep 2017… wait… oh no that’s Oct (17th) 2017 (actual, but close enough)
        v1803, April 2018
        v1809, Sep 2018… god damnit, I mean Nov 2018 (actual, 2 months later?)
        v1903, May 2019
        v1909 Nov 2019
        v2004, May 2020
        v20H2, Hoctober 2020
        v21H1, Hmay 2021
        v21H2, Hnovember 2021
        v22H2, Hoctober 2022…

        Windows 11 isn’t any better

        21H2
        22H2
        23H2
        24H2

        It’s just a mess… it was “good” for a while then turned to straight shit… Where the fuck is 22H1? I consider 2004 supposed to be 20H1…Why even bother with the H2 for Windows 11 at all? There’s never an H1… They don’t correspond to build numbers or anything like that at this point anyway. I think it’s supposed to correspond to halfyears? What happens when they have to push a second version in the second half of the year? Do we get 24H2v2?

        I hate companies that fucking change their versioning more than once per product.

        • H is for half year. So, H1 = first half of the year.

          Also, I never knew the four-digit build numbers were related to months. I always thought they were just creating builds and seeing which ones stick. Those that didn’t wouldn’t be shipped.

      • 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.