I believe that’s apocryphal… Some people came up with that theory on twitter, but AFAIK it’s not been confirmed. It only matters in some edge cases of an edge case.
And let’s be real, if backwards compatibility really mattered, they could have made the API return “Nine” or “IX” or whatever and used “9” everywhere else in the UI, marketing, packaging, whatever.
The real reason is probably the simplest and stupidest: Microsoft’s marketing department got impatient and went for the big round number because 10>9. Also why NVIDIA went 9xx->10xx->20xx… bigger number = better, it’s really that mind-numbingly stupid.
I believe that’s apocryphal… Some people came up with that theory on twitter, but AFAIK it’s not been confirmed. It only matters in some edge cases of an edge case.
And let’s be real, if backwards compatibility really mattered, they could have made the API return “Nine” or “IX” or whatever and used “9” everywhere else in the UI, marketing, packaging, whatever.
The real reason is probably the simplest and stupidest: Microsoft’s marketing department got impatient and went for the big round number because 10>9. Also why NVIDIA went 9xx->10xx->20xx… bigger number = better, it’s really that mind-numbingly stupid.