Windows 10 is out in the market and it’s been a long and winding read. Now let’s discuss about the most confusing things about the latest version of Windows. When Windows 10 was released, the most surprising thing was not that it was released, but that Windows would be skipping version 9 and heading straight to 10. Why Microsoft did this, is still not clear and Microsoft never really gave any clear answer.

As we know earlier also, Microsoft released many versions in between Windows 3 and Windows 7 by a specific name instead of a number: like 95, 98, NT, Me, 2000, Vista, and so on. When Windows 7 was released by the Microsoft, there was actually a similar amount of disbelief as it is in Windows 10; since after a series of named versions of Windows, it seemed odd to switch back to numbers.

Some people say that, there is also the fact that the name of each Windows release actually does not correspond to version number. For example, Windows 8.1 is actually version 6.3 of Windows, Windows 8 was 6.2, Windows 7 was 6.1, Windows Vista was 6.0, Windows XP was version 5.1, and Windows NT 5.0 was actually version 5.0 and so on. Thus accordingly Windows 10 is version 6.4. But modern versions of Windows are still based on the Vista kernel and code base- including Windows 10, which is actually Windows 6.4. Developers still don’t know when will they eventually reach internal version 7.0, but they’ll cross that bridge when they get there.

Some other reasons for skipping Windows 9:

As officially there was no announcement why Microsoft decided to keep its new operating system name as Windows 10 instead of Windows 9, people stared giving their own views and theories, which they think might be correct. A journalist in Japan said that the number 9 is considered unlucky in Japan. Microsoft has a big enough presence in Japan and due to which they may have skipped Windows 9 to avoid any weirdness or ill will. Similarly, few year back a company in Japan did the same thing when it skipped version 9 of its antivirus software.

Second, a Reddit user who claims to be a Microsoft Developer posted a line of code showing some reasonable confusion that could be the reason why company decided to go with Windows 9.

This means that Microsoft noticed some developers were putting a line of code in third-party products to check the version of Windows a device was running. The code checks to see if the version starts with the initial letter 9, which could potentially confuse windows application development into thinking its Windows 95 or Windows 98.