REDMOND, WA – Microsoft Corp. unveiled its newest operating system this week, the promising looking Windows 10, as the planned follow-up to the current offering, Windows 8. Early reports describe a slick, functional operating system that has every chance of being the best version of Windows yet. So what’s the problem?

There was never a Windows 9.

Industry insiders are baffled by this omission of the number 9, and many are worried it points to a larger problem within Microsoft.

“It seems clear at this point that Microsoft is suffering from a arithmatic disorder, called Acalculia,” says industry consultant Dan Forsythe. “It’s effects are devastating. Acalculia is an acquired impairment which makes the simplest mathematical tasks impossible, including recognizing the heirarchy and ordering of numbers. And the bad news is, Microsoft has it.”

Forsythe points out that this isn’t the first public expression of this counting arythmia from Microsoft. The history goes back even a decade or more.

In 2005, Microsoft released the sequel to its hit XBOX video games console. But rather than call it the XBOX 2, they named it the XBOX 360, in a move that perplexed even as it entertained. And then, last year, they did it again. Their third XBOX games console entered the market as XBOX One.

“They are in a spiral. You can see the effects of this worsening over time,” says Forsythe. “Two of their major brands have been held up to ridicule, and the tragedy is they don’t have the numeric wherewithall to see the mistake.”

Indeed, Microsoft representatives seemed oblivious to the problem on Tuesday, as a statement released to the press disclosed that the Microsoft Surface RT tablets had shipped “eleventy-billion units in the fifth quarter.”

Requests for comment from the Microsoft Store in City Creek were stymied as simple telephone operation proved to be beyond the staff’s current capabilities.