Yeah but then Apple dropped their longstanding practice of naming MacOS releases 10.x and went to MacOS 11 and if there’s one thing that Microsoft can never resist it’s copying Apple.

Yep, and that lasted all of about a year I think before MS backtracked on it. Microsoft has an MO, they release a bad version of Windows which everyone hates, then they remove/fix most of the things people hate and release a good version of Windows, then they get cocky and cram a bunch of stuff people hate into the next version and the cycle repeats. Right now we’re on the “everyone hates it” part of the cycle with Windows 11 where they crammed ads, tracking, and a mandatory MS account sign-in into it.

I’m expecting Windows 12 (or whatever they end up calling it, probably not 12 as that would be sane), to bring back offline accounts, remove the ads, and at least tone down the tracking, but that will only happen after enough people refuse to “upgrade” off of 10.

Alternatively they could go the XP route and release essentially Windows 11 SP2, which rips all the garbage out and makes it not suck, but I think that’s less likely.

No. This was one engineer that said that en everyone ran with it. Microsoft officially never said this