Well its finally winter and the leaves are falling, wind is blowing and new operating systems are launched.

In the last couple of weeks there has been two major launches, one from Microsoft and one from Canonical. I can hear you saying "Who are they ? I don't see their adverts on the tele being told by some smug gym type that he invented it" Well no you haven't and you wouldn't, But if you look at the BBC website or any of the Tech press you will know its the company behind Ubuntu and they have released 9.10 other wise known as Karmic Koala .

So what you may say, Well I'm not going to go on about which one is better etc, I know which I like and use every day in the running of my business and anyone who knows us will as well. What I am going to talk about is release names and time-lines. As this is interesting and goes someway into seeing the methodology of both companies.

OK so we have just had Windows 7 launched, That must be the 7th version of windows right? no wrong. Its no where near the 7th version and to be honest its hard to work out what version it is !!

In recent memory we had Windows 95 Ok released in 1995, Then Windows 98 released in 1998, and in 2000 windows Me, alongside these we had NT4 and win2000, Getting confused? Then have a look at this page and it will all be clear ;-)

Ok so lets look at the time line for Ubuntu. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases first thing we see is that they themselves are happy to publish a timeline giving all the details you want for releases in the past and into the future. They also run in a neat alphabetical and numeric order.

Now you may be asking, what does that say about each company, Well It seems to show one that knows where its been and is happy with that and also where its going and has mapped out its route to that goal, And it shows another that is splashing about with little direction and is embarrassed by what it did in the past.

This could well be a video of the development meetings :-) Ill let you guess which one. But contrary to what many people say it's the open source solution seems better planned and managed, and the closed solution in disarray, This may have something todo with the fact that one listens to what the users want and the other tells the users what they want.....