I blame Microsoft for starting the whole damn trend.

Back in the day, computer software was versioned by a steadily increasing number, always starting with 1.0. Computer software makers had no problem with this. Microsoft Windows was even at 1.0, but I bet few of you ever used it, let alone seen a copy of it out in the wild. It wasn’t until Windows 3.1 that it started catching on.

Meanwhile, back in Redmond, Microsoft was developing a “new 32-bit multitasking OS” that would be the future of computing: Windows NT. The “NT” stood for “New Technology”, a fact which seemed to elude the marketroids who designed the Windows 2000 splash screen, which proclaimed “Built on NT Technology”. Ah, redundancy.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Oh. Right. Anyways, NT was the first “1.0” product that didn’t have a 1.0 version number. It was mostly new code, save for the Program Manager interface. Of course, to capitialize on the Windows heritage, marketing decides to name the product “Microsoft Windows NT 3.1”.

Flash forward to 1995. Microsoft has redesigned the interface for Windows for Workgroups 3.11, added more 32-bit code, streamlined as much as possible. They didn’t dub it Windows 4.0, which is what it was. No. It was Windows 95, starting the insane “versioning products after the year in which it was released” trend. Of course, Microsoft Office had to be numbered the same way: Office 95 (not Office 7.0). Other software makers quickly followed suit, releasing things like Lotus SmartSuite 96, Quicken 98, etc., ad nauseam.

Then there was Windows XP. And Office XP. Where to they go from there: XP 2.0? NeXtP? The mind boggles.

But the thing that started this whole rant this morning was downloading and installing “Microsoft Windows Media Player 9 Series”. 9 series?! I can understand “9”, as it is the ninth-release of the venerable media player. But series? Are they trying to be BMW?

At any rate, all this versioning madness is kept alive by marketing dorks who still say things like, “We can’t call this software 1.0… people will think it’s not ready for prime time.” Well, crap. So, we should raise people’s expectations needlessly to make a few bucks more at product launch, but ultimately lose the customers who bought the junk thinking it was mature? Yeah.

Adobe has not succumbed to this stupidity. I purchased Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0 last year. It was cheaper than the “real” Photoshop by an order of magnitude. Even though it was a radical improvement over the previously-stripped down versions of Photoshop, even though it was built on Photoshop 6.0, they kept their head and called it 1.0. I don’t believe it hurt their sales a bit. Plus, people knew that it was a new product without having to remember if there was, say, a Photoshop Elements 2000 released the year before.

Then there is the opposite end of the spectrum: the overly-humble version, which most free (as in speech) software makers tend to use. Why? Because they don’t have to appease marketing or shareholders. Thus, many stable free software packages are versioned extremely low. In many cases, the packages aren’t even at 1.0, but are still widely used. If you are using RedHat Linux, try doing an rpm -qa and count the number of 0.x version software packages installed on your system.

Most amusing version story: when I was a rabid fan of OS/2, I used a shareware image viewer called PMView. It was awesome. I remember paying the registration fee, and using it happily. It wasn’t at 1.0 when I was using it (I think it was 0.74, or something like it). After Windows 95 stole my soul and stamped on it, I ditched OS/2.

About two years later, I was sent an e-mail from the developers of PMView. It said that PMView has released version 1.0, and that since I had registered it, I was able to download it free of charge. Huzzah!

PMView has lived on. It now has a Windows counterpart, and while it has been renamed to PMView 2000, they still keep real, sane version numbers (e.g. PMView 2000 version 2.3).