Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Let's see: 7, 8 -- um, what happened to 9?


I just recently got my Windows 7 desktop running satisfactorily. (I know--I'm slow, but the Windows 8 upgrade was so obviously awful that I decided to grab 7 while it was still available. Alas, the new machine wouldn't run my ancient but magnificent WordStar program, which I have used for writing articles and books for more than twenty years. It took a while to find a really good fix.)

For many years, Microsoft had a dependable policy of following a very good operating system with a very bad one. The winners are easy to catalog: Windows 98, Windows XP, and Windows 7. Just as reliably, the losers followed them: Windows ME (argh!), Vista (yuk!), and Windows 8 (you're kidding me, right--a touch screen?).

So we had every reason to believe that Windows 9 would be a winner. So what did Microsoft do? It has released Windows 10!

So which is it--is Windows 10 a winner because it follows 8, or was the winner the missing Windows 9, which means that 10 must necessarily be a loser?

For the time being, I shall stick with my handsome and steady (and WordStar-capable) Windows 7 machine. By the time it dies, Microsoft will no doubt be launching the twelfth (actually, tenth) iteration of its operating system.

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