I wonder will there be windows 12 in the short term. They haven't even finished their taskbar rework yet. What do you mean by next version? A even more broken desktop environment? Or they just randomly bump the number without changing anything obvious?
Historically there's often been a lot of bluster about forcing everyone to the new weird version by this and that date, then backtracking with the dates until the major issues have been resolved with a new major version that reverts the weirdest changes.
Microsoft's work on Windows appears a bit random but they seem to have a working failsafe at the executive group (or board or billg?) level. At least eventually.
