What if Windows 10 isn’t the Future of Windows? (Premium)

It's been a tumultuous year for Windows. But what if Windows 10 has little to do with the future of Windows? What if Windows 10 failing was, if not a plan, then at least something that Microsoft feels is acceptable so that it could move more quickly to the next thing?
My worry is that this next thing won't really be Windows. And the evidence certainly supports this worry, since Microsoft has been openly testing and shipping various platforms that are not Windows for decades.
Looked at in the context of history, Microsoft began developing something called Windows---which at the time was a graphical shell that ran on top of MS-DOS---in the early 1980s. The first (terrible) version shipped in 1985, and the first truly usable version shipped in 1990. But when Windows surged in popularity in the early 1990s, it became the dominant, if not monopoly, force in the PC industry.
Despite this, Microsoft knew it needed a more sophisticated computing architecture to succeed in a rapidly evolving market. After a few fits and starts with UNIX and OS/2, it brought in Dave Cutler and a small team from Digital to adapt a new system into a multi-platform, network-capable UNIX killer called NT, for New Technology. The first version, released in 1993, looked and worked like the DOS-based Windows versions that were just becoming popular at the time. But NT had a modular architecture that allowed it to support multiple OS "personalities" that could run side-by-side. Originally, Microsoft expected OS/2 and POSIX to contend with Windows, though that plan quickly went by the wayside. (That said, the resulting architecture is what later led to x86 app emulation in Windows 10 on ARM.)
NT replaced the DOS-based versions of Windows, and became Windows, starting with Windows XP in 2001. Something that was not Windows ... became Windows. It wasn't just called Windows. It was Windows.
It took NT only 8 years to make that transition. And yet here we are, almost 18 years later, still using the same NT architecture in Windows today.
Yes, Windows (NT) has improved dramatically over those years. Microsoft has done a lot of work to componentize the system, for example, to ensure that it can scale from very small devices up to servers and datacenters and special-use hardware like HoloLens and Surface Hub. It has been enhanced almost endlessly with new functionality. And after Microsoft let its cross-platform capabilities fall by the wayside, Windows (NT) is once again being actively developed across multiple hardware architectures, including ARM.
But it's still NT. It's still a relatively ancient codebase, parts of which date back to the late 1980s. All of the improvements since then have added complexity. And as our usage of Windows has evolved, so too have the demands on this mountain of legacy code. One can almost hear it creaking under the demands of Windows as a Service (WaaS), an aggressive servicing plan that its original architects could never have imagined or wan...

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