So already the rumor mill has been churning for Windows 9.  According to BetaNews, Win9 will see a return to some well loved and missed elements of Win7 and a few news things that may or may not leave a good taste in your mouth.  Speaking of taste, the return of the Start button and menu.  New coke old coke anybody?  Kinda feels like that.  The release of Win 8 has been so poorly accepted by the public, that by admitting they made a mistake and are giving people back what they want could work.  Also moving away from 8 as fast as possible to 9 is not a bad marketing move either.

Rumor mill has it that there will be one more update to win8 and that will close it out.  The lessons learned on win8, both from a useability point of view as well as coding will be rolled into win9. However, something else will be rolled into win9 as well; remote authentication.  Perhaps the opening salvo into a subscription model as done with Office instead of using a key system, which is constantly hacked, especially in China.  Here is a quote from WZor on the Russian-language Ru-Board

It’s assumed that the activation of products distributed via ESD-RETAIL channels will be more tightly associated with a specific PC and that activation will be done when user will log in to Microsoft Store. Activation key won’t be given to user and he won’t need to enter key manually.

So what is interesting here is the possibility that windows will join the update path that many OS now follow instead of having a major release every 18 to 22 months. Stay tuned.