I hear its because the Windows 9 they have been working on has been not just amazing but overly amazing. Too good to put onto the market for now so instead they shelved until a later date when they need it and instead went to another iteration they had also been working on...
Close to this actually, with caveats for values of awesome.
It's more that 9 was focused more on a combination of virtualization, distributed computing on par with ThinClients than installed units, and cloud tech that would work insanely well for the vast majority of people out there.
The biggest obstacle is/was the number of people that require locally installed applications who would not be comfortable with the combination of cloud and distributed computing at the extents that were intended for implementation, and a substantial portion of that number would not be willing to take the steps needed to get all of their programs up to speed and tech. So in part, 9 is being held back, and 10 is focusing more on attempting to touch on the features of 9 while keeping more to the architecture of 8.
You'd be surprised how many people don't have internet or fast enough internet.
So, maybe they took notes from a fiasco at one of the XBox One announcements:
Question: "What about people with no/slow Internet?"
M$ guy/girl: "There is the XBox 360 for that."
Anyway, could be awesome or could be bad.
We live in an area where just across the road they are giving at&t broadband bundle. But we are not likely to get the broadband anytime in the near future. For now we are using Wifi Jetpacks. Recently we took our HP in for service and had windows 8 upgraded to 8.1.
Personally, the way the non-existant 9 looks compared to 10, it looks more like a media circus. They are trying to sell 10 as a better product because it is a higher number and therefore better than the mere 9.
Computer savvy people won't buy that of coarse, but the majority of the public that buys the PCs are not computer savvy.
Try to tell my parents the truth and they will think you are speaking in some alien language (Windows 10..."It's a cook book!")
Anyone actually considers the number as anything more than part of the name anyway ? For me it's just Next-Windows-after-the-last-one.