14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 8 could reportedly sport Windows 6.2 as the version number, according to a third-party source. Of course, Microsoft has yet to share any details related to the versioning of Windows vNext with the public, but there is a precedent indicating that the version of Windows 8 might end up as 6.x rather than Windows 8.0.
Windows8italia managed to come across a new driver from NVIDIA which apparently references a new Windows kernel, version 6.2, which can only be associated with the next major iteration of Windows.
This information needs to be taken with a grain of salt as there’s no official confirmation from the software giant, an aspect that is bound not to change, at least in the immediate future.
But believe it or not, it’s highly probable to have Windows 6.x as the version for Windows vNext.
Just think about Windows 7. The successor of Windows Vista, which was Windows 6.0 is version 6.1.
This versioning change ensures a greater level of backwards compatibility, at least in terms of the applications that perform version checking as a part of the installation process.
Fact is that the vast majority, if not all Vista apps work seamlessly with Windows 7, and one of the reasons is the small change in terms of version numbers, in addition to the fact that the two platforms share a range of elements, being an evolutionary step forward for Microsoft, rather than revolutionary.
And there is a conversation between Mark Russinovich and Mark Minasi from Microsoft dating back to early 2009 in which the two offer a peek into the versioning plan for the successors of Windows 7, which at the time was in Beta (via msftkitchen).
“Mark Russinovich: And one comment about the version number, the version number change is actually one of the biggest impacts on application compatibility.
“When we moved to Windows Vista from XP going from a version number of 5.1 to 6, actually breaks lots of apps that check for the major version number. So a lot of people look at the version number and try to read something into it.
“Like, .1, well that’s now a major upgrade or rev over what we had previously, and actually it’s totally meaningless from that perspective. It’s just simply saying, this is a different version of the OS, and we are actually going to just rev the minor version number so that we don’t break those apps that are checking the major version number.
“If you follow that logic you can figure out the version number for Windows 8. Right, Mark?”
“Mark Minasi: “So version 18 will be 6.1.1.1.1.1…”
“Mark Russinovich: “Exactly”.”