Why does the Windows 7 OS-tan have a cat?

Is the cat Explorer?

Or just her marketing shill? Check out this advert she appears in.

Win7-tan is weird because apparently she has been officially endorsed, at least according to wikipedia.

A friend of mine mentioned that she was officially endorsed, but…I still wonder >.>

Ok I’ll bite, what’s an OS-tan, and how could one possibly get obsessed by manga pictures of a little kid?. Where is ragingloli when you need him?

@markyy -Tan is the way little kids pronounce the suffix “chan”, which in turn is the suffix you append to something in Japan to make it a “cute” something. So the adorable, kid-like aphilotus would be aphi-chan, or as aphichan himself would pronounce his name, aphi-tan!

The OS-tans, then, are Small, Cute, usually female, Childlike Anthropomorphizations of the various Operating Systems that exist. The Windows-tans are all siblings, obviously, and the Unix/Linux-tans are like a big crazy clan of incest, and the Mac/OSX-tans tend to be catgirls (thanks to the longstanding Apple policy of naming their products after types of big-cat.

OS-tans are an interesting crossover between the anime/manga sphere and the computer-geek sphere, not unlike the Alternate History Geek and Manga Geek crossover Hetalia:Axis Powers, a comic about the anthropomorphized European nations from Between the Great Wars, centering around “Useless Italy”, a smart but slightly cowardly young man, and his travails working for Germany, who is trying to train him, but always has to meet the demands of his “Crazy boss” (Hitler).

I don’t know why I know that.

What are those things on the girl’s cheeks?

@Kraigmo Floating Blush Stickers

@aphilotus Whoa there’s a whole thing on that? Crazy. So the Windows one is officially endorsed then?

@styfle The Windows 7 one has been used in ads, yes.

@aphilotus You know what that means? Microsoft is disparate for advertising lol.

Thanks @aphilotus , those blush stickers are so prominent (and odd looking) I knew there must be a name to them.