I wish convenient ideas like that which become memes would die off as I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it, for example I doubt they have alternating teams for every other version. More to the point, from an outside perspective I don't see any change in direction that would drastically change windows for the better within foreseeable future or the timespan a "windows 12" would release.
> I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it
Last version was really bad, let's focus on fixing problems on the next ... last version was great, we need new revolutionary features to sell the next one.
That was visible on the older versions of Windows. Win 95 was kinda bad because nothing worked very well, then 98 fixed things, then ME tried to redo everything that still worked badly, what didn't work so they merged everything that worked into 2000. XP both worked badly at the beginning, and well at the end; Vista rebuilt a lot of stuff, and 7 fixed it so it worked.
Yeah, I've never really bought that meme. They probably just jumped to 10 because they wanted a bigger number than a competitor, maybe OS X. This is the company that released the first version of windows NT as 3.1 because Netware was at that version at the time and probably called the Xbox 2 the 360 so it had a larger number than Sony.
It's not anything at Microsoft that's doing it, it's just the way people are. Microsoft announces some big, new thing, and everybody hates it. When the next version of Windows comes out, people are used to that new thing, so they don't hate it. The new version has a ton of stuff they hate, but because the last version was sooo bad they ignore it all.
