As you know, Microsoft announces a lot of products that are in beta phase with specific codenames and makes us to warm towards future improvements earlier. If I want from you to list some of the codenames, which ones do you think of first? Whidbey, Orcas, Yukon, Longhorn etc...
When I examined a link that I came across in Wikipedia, I realized that Microsoft has been using codename as an important standard since years. You can both scan codename history and see the point where we are while time travelling from this page. Where is Windows 3.1, where is Windows Vista