Microsoft always has such a weird relationship with naming conventions... just look at Xbox and all of its descendants.

Imagine they skip 12 and call it 13 like they did with W10

With as little sense as Microsoft makes most of the time, that decision actually does make sense. A lot of programs and scripts were lazy about checking the Windows version and just checked for the presence of a '9' in the version string to determine if they were running on Windows 95/98.

A bunch of shit would have broken if they had released Windows 10 as Windows 9, which is what it should have been semantically.

They are more likely to skip Windows 13 due to "triskaidekaphobia" (fear of the number 13) though, like they did with internal versions for Office:

• Office 2003 (11.0)
• Office 2007 (12.0)
• Office 2010 (14.0)
• Office 2013 (15.0)

But I imagine it will be something more stupid like Windows L or Windows One.

Hey that's why I wrote 14. Because I think they will

Windows 9 was a real thing.

I think either I'm having a stroke or you're having a stroke, because I don't understand what's written here.

That's by design. One of windows core features is it's backwards compatibility.

Yeah even as a technician that's one I run on the off chance that it actually does something.

Which, sometimes it does, just often enough that I wouldn't call it useless.