Microsoft deserves all the crap they’ve ordered, but skipping 9 on versioning was pretty smart move on their part. There’s still a ton of older software which just checks if windows version matches ‘windows 9’ to include both 95 and 98 (and all their variants). If 8.1 was released as 9 it would’ve broken a lot of compatibility which at least then was a big deal for Windows. And it still is, but now it seems that they’ll happily break everything from their most known product.