Windows 9 is Coming in April 2015

Over the weekend, Paul Thurrott, a well-known and connected blogger on all things Windows, leaked that Microsoft is gearing up for a major OS shift. According to Thurrott, the new OS announcement will come at the BUILD developers conference in April 2014 in San Francisco. A year later Microsoft will issue this major release, which is currently known as codename "Threshold" but most likely will be called Windows 9. Threshold will go through three development milestones during the year before releasing to the public. 

The codename is actually a reference to 2001's Halo, arguably Microsoft's most successful video game (Threshold is the name of the planet that the Halo ring orbits). Thurrott also said Threshold will see improvements with Metro, Windows design language with Windows 8, and may allow Metro-style apps to run with desktop apps as well, though nothing concrete has been announced. 

"In some ways, the most interesting thing about Threshold is how it recasts Windows 8 as the next Vista," Thurrott writes in his post. Since Windows 8's release in August 2012, Microsoft does seem to be reliving a familiar nightmare. Thurrott notes that only 25 million PCs run Windows 8.1. Microsoft has also seen stymied app development near the end of 2013. The Windows 8 experiment was an ambitious one—to get users comfortable with tablet/PC interface and move closer to the all-in-one computing vision—but now it looks like Windows is changing directions. Some analysts are also saying that Windows should consider going the free route, cribbing from Apple and Android's playbook. 

That doesn't mean Microsoft is abandoning Windows 8.1. The company still plans to roll out two forthcoming updates. The first is minor and "largely designed to improve the shared code use between Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1" to help developers make apps on both platforms,according to The Verge. The second update could see the return of the "Start" menu, a function many users have missed since Windows 7, though that feature may also be reserved for Threshold. Update 1 will become publicly available in April 2014, most likely at the BUILD conference.