With Windows 8 ‘tanking hard,’ Microsoft preps Windows 9 for 2015

Whomever Microsoft appoints as its new CEO, it looks like they’ll have to start work immediately cleaning up the mess left by Windows 8. Paul Thurrott writes that Microsoft is hard at work preparing a major new Windows release for April 2015 that is now codenamed “Threshold.” Thurrott says there’s a great sense of urgency surrounding the new release because “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.”

So what can we expect from Threshold? Thurrott says that it will be Microsoft’s attempt to basically airbrush Windows 8 out of the public’s memory, which is why Microsoft will likely brand it as Windows 9. Other than that he says that “maturing and fixing the ‘Metro’ design language used by Windows will be a major focus area of Threshold” although he admits that “it’s not clear what changes are coming, but it’s safe to assume that a windowed mode that works on the desktop is part of that.”

Other than that, though, it sounds as though Microsoft is still working out the details of what the new Windows will look like. Thurrott says it may be a “make or break release” for Microsoft and says that the company wants it to be to Windows 8 what Windows 7 was to Vista.