Sadly, it's not new. The former Sun Microsystems was the king of this insanity. Like how Java jumped from 1.4.2 to 5, except that it was still sometimes 1.5.

Sadly, it's not new. The former Sun Microsystems was the king of this insanity. Like how Java jumped from 1.4.2 to 5, except that it was still sometimes 1.5. Or worse, the SunOS renaming fiasco, where SunOS was also concurrently Solaris. So that SunOS 4.1.1 was also Solaris 1.0. Except that, crazily, so was SunOS 4.1.1.1. Eventually, SunOS 4.1.4 (aka Solaris 1.1.2) was the last of the old BSD-based SunOS line and Solaris 2.0 came out, which was mostly SysV and different enough that most everybody started calling it Solaris. (Except that `uname` still reported SunOS 5, of course.) And then everything was sane again. At least until Solaris 2.7, aka SunOS 5.7, which they started calling Solaris 7. So, Microsoft has a ways to go before the names are completely ridiculous. (ObDisclaimer: Microsoft employee.)