Goodbye “Aspirational” Vista, hello again to numbered Windows versions. Microsoft announces that Windows 7 will be called... Windows 7.
It all started back in 1985 with Windows 1.0, which begat Windows 2.0, 3.0, 3.11 and then... Windows 95. Which more or less broke the Windows numbering arrangement, something that would then be shattered entirely by following releases of 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP and the myriad different Windows versions called Vista.
But it seems that Microsoft never actually gives up on old ideas, resting them instead. Microsoft has been informally using the moniker “Windows 7” to describe the successor to Vista, in much the same way that Vista was “Longhorn”, 95 was “Chicago” and ME was “Oh god – are we really releasing this?”. Well, OK, it was Millennium, but we know what they were thinking.
In any case, it appears that the next Microsoft OS you find on your desktop will actually keep the Windows 7 code name, according to a recent post on the Windows Vista Team Blog.
Apparently, naming something 7 despite nobody really thinking of Vista as "Windows 6" is "in the interests of simplicity", according to Microsoft Blogger Mike Nash. You can read the full blog entry here.