Microsoft tried to kill the Desktop in Windows 8, but with Windows 9 the Desktop may well take center stage again. Reports says that the next Windows release, due possibly in the middle of 2015, may make the Desktop more useful than ever.
Paul Thurrott reports that the next major update to Windows, code-named "Threshold," originally planned as an update to Windows 8, will now likely be called Windows 9, "in order to distance itself from the Windows 8 debacle." It may be ready by April, 2015, he says.
Microsoft is betting big on Threshold because of the disaster that was Windows 8, and because Windows 8.1 hasn't seemed to stem the bleeding. Thurrot says:
"Threshold is more important than any specific updates. Windows 8 is tanking harder than Microsoft is comfortable discussing in public, and the latest release, Windows 8.1, which is a substantial and free upgrade with major improvements over the original release, is in use on less than 25 million PCs at the moment. That's a disaster, and Threshold needs to strike a better balance between meeting the needs of over a billion traditional PC users while enticing users to adopt this new Windows on new types of personal computing devices. In short, it needs to be everything that Windows 8 is not."
