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Microsoft Corp. announced today that the code name for its next operating system, Windows 7, will be the product’s official name. Mike Nash, vice president of Windows product management, said the company was sticking with the label for simplicity’s sake. “Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore ‘Windows 7′ just makes sense,”
According to the Windows timeline on Wikipedia, XP’s kernel is tagged as 5.1, and Vista’s as 6.0.
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Microsoft’s own version of its client operating system timeline ends with Windows XP, but it assumes nine editions as of Vista: Windows 3.0, NT, 95, NT Workstation, 98, Millennium, 2000, XP and Vista. By that timeline, Microsoft doesn’t regard Windows 1.0, which it released in 1985, or Windows 2.0, launched in 1987, as “true” Windows.
More than two weeks ago, Microsoft had said it would issue an alpha version of Windows 7 to attendees of its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) and Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), which open Oct. 27 and Nov. 5, respectively. Today, Nash called that preview a “prebeta developer-only release.”
It’s unusual for Microsoft to use an operating system code name as the official product moniker, and Nash acknowledged that fact. “I am pretty sure that this is a first for Windows,” he said.
Operating system code names at Microsoft have ranged from “Chicago,” which was the name for what became Windows 95, and “Memphis” (Windows 98), to “Whistler” (Windows XP) and “Longhorn” (Windows Vista).
Microsoft has not pinned a ship date to Windows 7, but it has said it was shooting for three years after the release of Vista, which would mean it would be released late in 2009 or early in 2010.
I thought that Windows 7’s codename was Vienna, or have they dropped that all together?