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The future of MS Windows

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pwhodges:
For all those wondering whether the next version of Windows will be called Windows 8.2 or Windows 9, the answer is... (click to show/hide)Windows 10

Seriously, a good reason is that there is still software out there that tests for compatibility with Windows 9x, which might get confused.

bhtooefr:
However, I didn't think that's how Windows versions were reported to applications, I thought they used GetVersion/GetVersionEx (or nowadays one of the new APIs, now that GetVersion has been deprecated and emulated with 8.1), which always has reported the kernel numeric version (or an emulated numeric version, but never the marketing version), rather than any API to get a textual version (or, rather, the internal code to display a textual version was either hardcoded or itself used GetVersion and a lookup table). And GetVersion was the documented way to get the version since at least Windows 3.0.

Basically, if GetVersionEx weren't deprecated, software would see PlatformID == 2 (which means NT, PlatformID == 1 means the DOS-based lineage), MajorVersion == 6, MinorVersion == 4, on whatever they had called the new version of Windows. (What it'll actually see, normally, is MinorVersion = 2, they're basically always going to report Windows 8.0 from here on out, unless a newer version is in the manifest. There's other ways they want software to detect a Windows version now.)

If they were checking for Win9x, they'd want PlatformID == 1, MajorVersion == 4.  (And, there was quite a lot of software that would have worked perfectly fine on Windows 2000 and XP, that broke because it didn't work on NT 4, and was checking PlatformID... this is a large reason why the compatibility settings existed, so you could have Windows return that it was a different version (as far back as Windows 2000) to the application.)

cesium133:
Some applications check the Windows version by looking at the NT version number, which is why Windows 8.1 is internally called Windows NT 6.3. Vista was 6.0, 7 was 6.1, and 8.0 was 6.2.

LTK:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=84NI5fjTfpQ
(See 2:20) Shock and awe! The next version of Windows will feature applications that *gasp* actually run in windows!

For real, how did they ever allow Windows 8 to take the windows out of Windows?

Anyway, if this version disappoints again there's always Windows 95 waiting for you. Watching and waiting.

hedgie:
Yeah, surprise, surprise.  I have enough screen real-estate, that unless I'm watching a film or something, I don't want things to run full-screen.  As much as I tend to complain about Microsoft stuff, I actually think they mostly had things right with Win7.  With the Win8 beta, I actually scrubbed the VM about 20 minutes after installation, because it was just so painful to use on an actual desktop.  I'm actually glad (since I know in my life there are times where I'll have to use Windows), they decided to back-pedal, and go with an interface that is easier to navigate through keyboard and mouse.

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