[wp-hackers] WordPress 3

[Chris Williams]

I was at Microsoft when we decided to change from versions to years: with Windows 95.  The decision was done because:

1) It sounded modern, cool, hip.  There were lots of people who then said "so Windows 01 will sound ancient?".  But the marketing people didn't care, they wanted the cool "95".  The jokes inside soon became: "so that's a percent complete, right?"

2) It implied a release every year, which was just fine with the sales folks, and the dev folks thought they actually could plan and release an OS release on that kind of schedule (major, minor, minor, major, minor...).  I think Vista shows the folly of that argument.

3) It would make people want to upgrade: "holy cow, you're still running that ancient '98 version?  But it's 2001!".  It's easy to see running "Windows" forever, but Windows '95 sounds ancient -- you better upgrade.  The problem with that is, if it's 2006 and the only product the company has to sell is Office 2003, the company looks stupid, not the customer.

You can see that desktop Windows abandoned years with Windows 2000 (now XP or Vista), the server people still call it by years (Windows Server 2007, Exchange 2003, etc.), and the Office and other product people love it.

I think WP shouldn't do years for a couple of reasons: 1) WP doesn't have anywhere near the same kind of marketing pressure that Microsoft has, and 2) more importantly, WP actually *can* and *does* release more than one product a year.

-----Original Message-----
From: Computer Guru
Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] WordPress 3

While I agree that WP shouldn't be year-versioned, I disagree with your
reasons.