Editing Software versioning (section)

===Version numbers as marketing===
A relatively common practice is to make major jumps in version numbers for marketing reasons. Sometimes software vendors just bypass the 1.0 release or quickly release a release with a subsequent version number because 1.0 software is considered by many customers too immature to trust with production deployments.{{citation needed|date=May 2020}} For example, as in the case of [[dBase II]], a product is launched with a version number that implies that it is more mature than it is.

Other times version numbers are increased to match those of competitors. This can be seen in many examples of product version numbering by Microsoft, [[America Online]], Sun [[Solaris (operating system)|Solaris]], [[Java Virtual Machine]], SCO Unix, [[WordPerfect]]. [[Microsoft Access]] jumped from version 2.0 to version 7.0, to match the version number of [[Microsoft Word]].

Microsoft has also been the target of "catch-up" versioning, with the [[Netscape (web browser)|Netscape]] browsers skipping version 5 to 6, in line with Microsoft's [[Internet Explorer]], but also because the Mozilla application suite inherited version 5 in its [[user agent]] string during pre-1.0 development and Netscape 6.x was built upon Mozilla's code base.

Another example of keeping up with competitors is when [[Slackware]] Linux jumped from version 4 to version 7 in 1999.<ref>{{cite web|title=Slackware FAQ|url=http://www.slackware.com/faq/do_faq.php?faq=general#0}}</ref>