The desktop environment in Windows 8.1 is pretty good.

This was not the message that Microsoft conveyed at its Windows 10 launch event last week, a presentation that had Microsoft's historically change-averse but financially important business customers in mind. Whether the company was looking forward to multiple desktops and Continuum or backward to the Start menu and the command prompt, Microsoft's message was clear: we have finished undoing all that stuff you didn't like.

But regardless of the message, the Windows 10 desktop is really only building on the foundation Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Update 1 laid. These updates restored the Start button, allowed desktop and laptop users to boot into the desktop environment by default, and gave the familiar Windows taskbar the ability to launch and switch between full-screen Windows Store apps.

After using the new desktop for a few days, I can say that it really feels more like Windows 8.2 than Windows 10 (the software isn't nearly done yet, but the point stands). And there's some indication that this was Microsoft's plan all along; the Start menu and the ability to run Windows Store apps in resizable windows were originally rumored to be part of an "Update 2" for Windows 8.1, though those plans were obviously scrubbed.

So why is Microsoft calling this one Windows 10 rather than continuing to build on top of the two-year-old Windows 8? The answer is in the name.

Vista was fine, too—eventually

When Windows Vista launched, it had real problems. It required significantly more resources to run well than XP did. It was slower at certain things than XP was. It ushered in several new driver models, breaking compatibility with older peripheral devices. The drivers that were updated were often rough in the beginning, and they contributed significantly to Vista's general feeling of instability.

But by the time Service Pack 1 (and especially Service Pack 2) rolled around, many of those problems had evaporated. Drivers had improved, and PC OEMs had beefed up their systems with more RAM and the dual-core processors that quickly invaded the mainstream market in the mid-to-late 2000s. And yet after three years, Vista had peaked at about 19 percent of the desktop operating system market (by comparison, Windows XP had about 71.5 percent of the market at the time, and the just-released Windows 7 had crept up to about 1.5 percent). It took just two years for Windows 7 to hit 40 percent market share and displace XP as the most-used version of Windows. This happened even though Windows 7 was very much a refinement built directly on top of Vista's foundation—just as mild a change as the jump from Windows 8.1 to the Windows 10 preview.

One could argue that those refinements were what won people over, although by 2009, XP was feeling long in the tooth in a way it didn't feel back in 2006. But again, a big part of the problem was the name. Microsoft highlighted the problem in a circa-2008 series of ads called the "Mojave Experiment." Microsoft's point in these ads was that when people actually used Vista instead of just hearing about it, their opinion of the operating system improved. The point that the company inadvertently made was that Vista's negative first impression had stuck, regardless of how much the operating system had improved since launch.

Microsoft hasn't run any "we tricked you into saying you liked Windows 8" ads, but the newer OS' early reputation has come to define it in much the same way. Data shows that Windows 8 and 8.1 collectively control about 12.3 percent of the desktop operating system market after two years, an adoption rate that can be described as "Vista-esque." (The fact that nearly half of all Windows 8 users are on version 8.0 is a separate problem but no less worrisome, since it means those people aren't seeing the marked improvements we got in Windows 8.1.)

Obviously, it would be ideal for Microsoft if it could pull off another Windows 7 here, replacing Windows 8.1 with a lightly modified but "new" OS that quickly displaces its predecessor and starts winning over some Windows 7 (and even Windows XP) holdouts. The fresh start that a new name provides is just one more way to try to make the next version of Windows stick.

Windows 8 2.0

Windows 8 was never as bad as its biggest critics would have you believe, but it made users meet it halfway. The Start screen is in many ways an improvement over the legacy Start menu. But depending on how you organized and launched your apps in older Windows versions, it could be confusing to navigate and it did a poor job of allowing people to discover how to use it. Learning keyboard shortcuts made interacting with Charms and switching between windows easier, but keyboard shortcuts are used more often by power users and less so by regular people.

The biggest problem, however, was that too many of the seams between the desktop and tablet environments were showing. You couldn't use the desktop without running into the tablet stuff, and you couldn't use it as a tablet OS without occasionally needing to switch to the desktop.

Windows 8.1 made a clearer delineation between the desktop and tablet environments, and Windows 10 defines those boundaries even more clearly while still making it simpler to switch between the two for users of convertible machines. Microsoft is backing down from the awkward "one interface for all devices" vibe that Windows 8 shipped with, and in doing so it has made it palatable to use the same operating system on multiple types of devices.

For those who championed Microsoft's bold attempt to redefine the desktop, this gradual return to something that looks more-or-less like the Windows 7 desktop may seem like backtracking. Maybe it is. But if the Start menu and a new name are what it takes to make Windows 8's numerous under-the-hood changes easier to swallow—faster booting, more versatile networking, faster system recovery via Refresh and Reset, new features like Storage Spaces, a vastly improved Task Manager, tight OneDrive integration, and so on—it seems like an acceptable concession.

And it's a necessary one, since making changes easier to swallow is Windows 10's job. It needs to take the improvements that Windows 8 delivered and bring them to the business customers who constitute Microsoft's base. New desktop features are going to help, including the new Mission Control-esque Task View, multiple desktops, a more versatile Snap, and ever-blurrier lines between traditional Windows desktop apps and new Windows Store apps. But moving away from calling it "Windows 8" may be Windows 10's most important change.