[bztzt]

Microsoft's head of marketing at the time posted about this on internal Yammer. He said there were two main reasons: first, "Windows 10" just did better in focus groups than Windows 9 or other alternatives; second, since the plan at the time was for all future changes to be delivered as updates rather than a newly branded Windows release†, it felt better to end on a round number.

† btw, what became Windows 11 started development as just another Windows 10 feature update, and what gets branded as a "new release" vs an "update" is mostly a marketing decision.

[tstrimple]

> what became Windows 11 started development as just another Windows 10 feature update, and what gets branded as a "new release" vs an "update" is mostly a marketing decision.

The move from Windows 10 to Windows 11 came with some pretty severe restrictions on supported hardware, so the version jump in this case makes sense to me. It would be a lot more difficult to push an "update" which obsoleted so much hardware like that.

[teh_klev]

> came with some pretty severe restrictions on supported hardware

That's hardware, and just like with the Linux kernel you have some tough choices to make about what you continue to support. Apple rendered my Intel Mac Mini a brick because despite having a 64 bit CPU its BIOS/UEFI or whatever was 32 bit and I was stuck with MacOS 10.6, no way to upgrade to 10.7 Lion.

[abhorrence]

The 10 -> 11 bump also coincided nicely with the Mac OS X -> 11 bump.