reddit thread that didn't quote right
I saw that too, but it smells like horse poo to me.
No way they make major
marketing decisions based on a thing like this. Even Microsoft isn't so ridiculous. Plus, they completely control the text string returned by the version object. I don't doubt that there is some ridiculous, awful code out there that does version checking this way. But, even if they decided to care about it, they could have easily just had it return something else (Windows v9 springs to mind).
If the redditor was actually a Microsoft engineer, then I'll even grant that it might be a ridiculous rumor inside the company. But that sounds a lot like people there discussing the change after the fact, and coming up with a convenient side-benefit to the (otherwise oddball) change.
And then, you know, rumor mill, and it becomes the reason why. Maybe. According to some guy.