SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft believes the next version of its operating system is such a big change that it’s calling the software Windows 10, skipping the more logical product name, Windows 9, entirely.
But compared to Windows 8, its much-maligned predecessor, the rough sketch of Windows 10 that Microsoft showed for the first time on Tuesday will seem comfortingly familiar to many people.
The changes reflect Microsoft’s continued search for a formula that will reinvigorate Windows and along with it sales of PCs, which have flagged badly in recent years. While Microsoft has lost a lot of cachet to Apple, Google and other companies that shape the mobile market, Windows still runs the vast majority of PCs in the world.
With Windows 8, Microsoft redesigned its operating system for a world increasingly populated with touch-screen devices, creating a start screen that looked unlike any Windows desktop before it. It filled the screen with a grid of tiles that allowed users to open applications with the tap of a finger and to see a constant flow of photos, Facebook status updates and emails with a quick glance.
But the new interface was deeply polarizing among users and seemed to overlook the fact that most people still use Windows on devices with mice and keyboards, not touch screens. “We didn’t quite get it right,” Joe Belfiore, a corporate vice president in Microsoft’s operating systems group, said at the company’s event on Tuesday.
Although Microsoft is not getting rid of the start screen with Windows 10, it is tucking it away so that many users may never see it. The software borrows some elements of the tile interface, but they will pop up on the screen only when a user clicks a menu button at the bottom of the screen.
The main screen of Windows 10 uses the desktop interface that Microsoft has used for decades with Windows. Microsoft began making it easier for its users to get rid of the tile interface with updates to Windows 8, but the new software goes further.
“This is what Windows 8 should have been,” said Carolina Milanesi, chief of research with Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.
Microsoft executives emphasized that the company was not giving up on making touch an important part of Windows. If someone uses Windows 10 on a hybrid device with a keyboard and a touch screen — Microsoft’s own Surface is one example — the software will reformat itself with the tile interface when a keyboard is detached. Eventually, some analysts predict, most new PCs will incorporate touch screens.
In spite of the familiar look, Microsoft executives said skipping the Windows 9 name was justified by other ambitious changes in the software. The operating system now shares a lot of common code with other Microsoft products, including its smartphone operating system, that will let developers more easily create apps that work across different devices.
Microsoft said it was holding its event on Tuesday in large part because it planned to begin briefing big business customers on the changes it is planning for the software. Those customers represent Microsoft’s most dependable source of profits and they have largely ignored Windows 8.
According to a study by Forrester Research, only about one in five organizations offers Windows 8 on PCs to employees now. Many businesses are running Windows 7, which first came out about four years ago. David Johnson, a Forrester analyst, said, “Microsoft needs to give enterprises reasons to move to a new version before it becomes a crisis.”
With Windows 10, Microsoft wants to give business customers the opportunity to provide input on the software before it is finished, said Terry Myerson, executive vice president of Microsoft’s operating system group. The product will not be released in final form until the latter half of next year.
“It’s a little bit of a journey,” Mr. Myerson said. “We decided to jump off today before we had all the answers.”
A picture on Thursday with an article about Microsoft’s new Windows 10 operating system was published in error in some editions. The photograph, of warehoused cellphones, was a duplicate of a picture on the same page for an article about people who sell or trade in their cellphones. The photograph was not of Joe Belfiore, a Microsoft executive, showing the new operating system. (His picture accompanied the Microsoft article in other editions.)