Last month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the company will not address Windows upgrades at its Build 2021 conference. He vowed that the “next generation of Windows” will bring significant improvements and that additional details would be forthcoming.
Then, earlier this week, Microsoft planned a “what’s next” event for Windows users only on June 24 at 11 a.m. ET. We managed to ignore the fact that the shadow formed by the crossbar on the windows logo lacked the horizontal bar in the reveal. Because the light streaming through casts an image that appears like an 11, it’s a big omission.
We know major changes are coming to the omnipresent operating system based on Nadella’s statements and what we’ve seen of the Sun Valley release.
Microsoft has not suggested that it will abandon the Windows 10 brand, and the previously stated that Windows 10 would be “the last version of Windows,” but that was a completely different Microsoft under Nadella’s leadership, which was only a year old at the time. It appears like it is intending to release Windows 11 based on the evidence.
In the previous 26 years, the schedule for iterating Windows names has been all over the place (starting with Windows 95). The shortest period was 13 months between Windows ME and Windows XP, but ME was a complete disaster, so that’s not surprising.
The longest lag was 63 months from XP to Vista (just over five years). The average time it takes Microsoft to change its name is three years. Windows 10 was released in July 2015, but the initial idea was for it to be the living version of the operating system that would be maintained indefinitely without the need for major new releases to replace it.