If the question is ‘will there be a version of Windows marketed as something greater than Windows 10?’ then here’s my answer. If that’s not your question, then see the other helpful replies below.
Marketing teams hate version numbers. They’re obtuse and difficult to use to explain an idea in simple terms a global audience will understand. You can look at any amount of hardware, software, book, music, movie, TV, etc products where the marketing teams decided the best strategy to enable pitching the product to the audience with maximum impact and least confusion was to either obfuscate the number (360, X, One, Infinity, ME, 2000, Forever, 0, Wii) or drop it altogether.
Right now the Windows marketing team has a reasonably strong brand with Windows 10. Iterating over the technology is strengthening it further in terms of reputation, and actually making brand erosion/rot somewhat irrelevant.
Until it isn’t.
Windows 10 will become depreciated as a brand name as soon as either:
Something irreparably damages the brand (Windows ME)
A competitive product supersedes it in a way that isn’t easily matched with iterative upgrades (MS-DOS>Windows vs Apple)
They truly innovate in something completely new and different, that they want to launch and make an appropriately big splash with (like they did when they went from MS-DOS to Windows, or to Windows 95)
In real terms those ‘big splashes’ were by modern standards rather pedestrian (new input device, dialogs that can overlap etc) but were significant for their time to bring us to where we’re at now with modern interfaces and multitasking technology.
What will the next big splash be? Depending on what competitors do, I think MS is now uniquely positioned to unite many disparate technologies and become a ubiquitous behemoth that provides the foundation for commodity hardware of any type- it’d accomplish this by making platform adoption trivial, and providing development tools and support beyond anything provided elsewhere. Arguably it’s already making large strides in those areas in recent years. To me it feels like they’re still testing this strategy out (admittedly with some ballsy all-in approaches I admire) but clearly learning from past mistakes that smelled like ‘Old Microsoft’ (Windows Phone’s attempt to identikit Apple’s mobile strategy by completely ignoring competitive products).
I’d like to see the next major OS launch feature some or all of the following things:
Runs on ANY hardware, open or closed. Develop your software once, it runs on your phone, TV, Laptop, fridge, watch, credit card).
You don’t even know it’s there. Do you know or care what kind of chip your washing machine’s logic board has on it? (it might be an m68k running Java).
AI. Recent announcements in the MS toolchain offer machine learning helpers to aid developers in maintaining coding standards, integrating APIs with fewer stumbling blocks and so on. A new platform designed to throw away all the problems the current platform presents by embracing AI in an advanced way that removes all the clumsiness of APIs, frameworks, libraries and all that mess.
Be the next internet. I’m not talking Silicon Valley decentralized (that already exists). I mean Information, communication, tools and entertainment with zero barriers. Easier than turning on a tap, more accessible than a newspaper, more neutral than a mobile phone. Death to the computer, phone, TV, and any peripheral item that allows humans to slowly consume digital information in an inefficient analog state. It’s not VR. It’s not Blockchain. It’s presence.