Waiting for Windows 12 (Premium)

In early February, ahead of the Bing Chat announcement, I predicted that Microsoft would release an AI-focused Windows 12. I based this prediction on a confluence of indicators that gathered steam in the wake of OpenAI's release of ChatGPT the previous November. In early January, for example, I opined that perhaps AI was "the next wave," using Terry Myerson's term for the computing platform that would supplant mobile in the same way that mobile had to the PC. And then barely a week later, I took Satya Nadella's quote about adding ChatGPT capabilities to “every Microsoft product" literally, welcoming one and all to "the AI era."

Since then, Microsoft has unleashed a flurry of AI products and services and is on track to fulfill Nadella's promise over the next several months. But things have been quiet on the Windows 12 front, in part because the software giant has aggressively pushed to get AI capabilities, even lame AI capabilities like Copilot in Windows 11, out the door as quickly as possible. But also in part because Microsoft has never, not once, publicly uttered the phrase Windows 12.

So we have been forced to read the tea leaves.

When Microsoft's Panos Panay appeared with AMD CEO Lisa Su at CES this past January to discuss the AI capabilities in AMD's Ryzen 7040 chipset, the conversation devolved into a weird love fest between the two companies and AI. And while the ever-awkward Panay stumbled through a lame litany of ways in which AI might enhance Windows in the future without actually saying anything, he put the idea in my head that a coming Windows version---let's call it Windows 12---would require an NPU much as Windows 11 requires a TPM. And that this requirement might in fact be what separates Windows 12 from Windows 11.

In March, when Microsoft announced a new Canary channel for the Windows Insider Program specifically to "support preview builds of platform changes that require longer lead times before getting released to customers," including "major changes to the Windows kernel," I thought, this is it. This channel is where Microsoft will test Windows 12.

And when Microsoft Build arrived in May, I figured this would be the first logical time for the software giant to discuss Windows 12. But instead, it announced a suite of AI capabilities across many of its products, many using some form of Copilot brand, including one for Windows. Windows 11. And then Stevie Bathiche gave a miracle of a talk in the wake of Panay's worst-ever presentation, deftly explaining the three types of AI implementations that all apps would use in the future, from copilots that would sit beside current apps to new apps with AI at the center to AI agents that would orchestrate across apps and services. This, surely, was another Windows 12 hint: Because Windows 11 will deliver on the copilot, Windows 12 could deliver on the other two, I figured.

But then the year droned on with no sign of Windows 12 at all. The June anniversary of the...