The Great Microsoft Confusion Never Ends

Microsoft is not exactly known for friendly, or even just understandable product version numbering.  We barely swallowed the Windows 7 SKU nightmare, now here’s another one.

A little while ago as part of  the new Windows Live tools, Microsoft released a new version of Windows Live Movie Maker. Supposedly an upgrade, users were shocked to find Live Movie Maker was a bare skeleton of its previous self, the non-Live just simply working Windows Movie Maker.  To put it more bluntly: there’s hardly anything you can do with the new Live version – unfortunately some users had already uninstalled the “old” but fully functional version.

But no worries, Microsoft came to rescue, offering up the old working version for download:

But for these more advanced users of Windows Movie Maker, there’s now some good news: the 2.6 version of Windows Movie Maker is available for download now – and it even works on Windows 7 Beta! If you want to get this older, more feature-rich version back, you can do so: just follow the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=D6BA5972-328E-4DF7-8F9D-068FC0F80CFC&displaylang=en

So far so good in fact I thought I would upgrade the old working version to a newer but not-as-new-as-Live ( I know, it’s confusing), but first I checked the release number of my own “old copy”.  What a surprise: it’s 6.0.

So what am I doing, upgrading from 6.0 to 2.6?  

But wait, that’s not all – there is enough confusion with Windows itself.  The next release of the Microsoft OS is commonly known as Windows 7, but if you look at the code it turns out Microsoft itself is calling it Windows 6.1.  BusinessWeek comes to the conclusion:

Still, it does raise the question of whether Windows 7 might better be called Vista Second Edition (remember Windows 98 SE?) were Microsoft less anxious to shed itself of the tainted Vista brand.

I feel vindicated having called it Vista Final for almost a year.