Seriously, Microsoft? You want to get Windows 9 — Windows freakin’ 9 — out in 2015?
I get that you want to distance yourself from the Windows 8.x train wreck. Who wouldn’t? But by upgrading Windows on a consumer pace, aren’t you taking a big chance that your enterprise customers will turn their backs on you? I mean, companies want desktop operating systems they can rely on for three to five years, not three to five seasons.
Let’s start with some fundamentals. As Paul Thurrott, senior technical analyst for Windows IT Pro and the boss of Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows, put it, “Windows 8 is tanking harder than Microsoft is comfortable discussing in public.” According to Thurrott, the free upgrade Windows 8.1, which offers major improvements over Windows 8, is installed on fewer than 25 million PCs. “That’s a disaster,” he wrote. Windows 9 (as it’s expected to be designated; Threshold is the code name for now) “will need to strike a better balance between meeting the needs of over a billion traditional PC users” and enticing users to a Windows experience on new types of personal computing devices. “In short, it needs to be everything that Windows 8 is not.”