Revert to old LabVIEW version naming

[Darin.K]

Now that my LV version is so "last year" I would just like to state my preference for the original naming scheme with simple version numbers.  If it seems too boring, you can go to Roman numerals, I'd purchase LabVIEW X. 

Of what has been tried recently: 6i, 7 Express, 8.20, and 2009 I prefer the simple naming to all of them.

[tst]

> but I put this in the same category as Russians who long for the old days of communism "when planes never ever crashed." 😉

I can guarantee that a lot fewer planes crashed before the Bolsheviks came into power. Long live the Tzar!

Unfortunately, I have a feeling that many people won't get that joke. 😞

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Who decides whether to bump the minor or major version? That's kind of the point... if you look at the last few years worth of releases, I think you'll find that every release has tended to be the same increment. You mention snippets and 3D graphs in 9.0, but are either of those on par with the entire LVOOP feature set introduced in 8.2? Any new feature tends to have kinks to work out, and the major/minor numbering convention is kind of a false front.

> My fear is that version 10.0 will be filled with more very intriguing, but not-quite ready features just to fill some quota of "new features",

Yes, new features. Whether they're not-quite-ready is yours to evaluate, but we sure won't be letting them out the door unless we think they're ready.

> and the nuts-and-bolts things we've wanted fixed for a long time will be pushed back again. 

No. I beleive we can trivially demonstrate that we're not pushing these things back by the publicized work on high kudos features from this Idea Exchange.  I believe you'd find evidence of a tradition of continuous improvement in less hyped fashion in all of our previous versions. I'm sure there are personal favorite dislikes that you can highlight that haven't been fixed and may still be unfixed in 2010, but across the board, I personally think the LV team does respond quickly to requests from our customers, to the best of our ability to do so.

Whether you call it a major or minor version bump, we always have new features -- that drives the majority of our sales. We always commit to fixing some significant percentage of the CAR backlog -- that maintains our quality. We always try to enrich the overall experience -- that retains our existing customers. Our last several releases have been of a consistent quality, and I think you can expect that to continue in the future.

[Darren]

National Instruments will not be implementing this idea. LabVIEW 20xx will continue to use year-based versioning, while LabVIEW NXG will use a numbered version scheme.