They'd work better, but wouldn't be perfect either since they had some arbitrary jumps. For a long time, release build version numbers were divisible by 400 -

They'd work better, but wouldn't be perfect either since they had some arbitrary jumps. For a long time, release build version numbers were divisible by 400 - they had to be divisible by 16 for servicing reasons[1], and divisible for 100 for marketing reasons (to look nice) [2] so build numbers were divisible by 400 for a long time. This meant that the final versions had some correlation to how much time had passed between versions, but it wasn't reliable. For instance, Win7 RTMed on 2009-10-22 as build 7600. Win8 RTMed on 2012-08-01. At one build a day, you'd expect a build number of 8614....and internally, we were pretty close to that, but the actual release number was 9200 (so we instantly gained almost 2 years of build numbers). For the story of why 9200, see [2]. They eventually got rid of both requirements, which is why the latest Windows release is 18363. [1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160330-00/?p=93223 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160330-00/?p=93... [2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-magazine/jj663498(v=msdn.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-m...