As bas as Bill Gates was I don't think he'd have let Windows 8 go the way they did to push the phone agenda. He'd most likely make it a blend of 98/XP with a touch of Vista (the good parts) and made sure of compatibility so older Microsoft products would continue to function: IE: Microsoft Home/Kids,etc.

Remember he left Microsoft sometime shortly after XP Service Pack 3. When XP was launched it was a broken mess till then and he quickly forced a fix to make driver's work correctly. Same with 98 when it came out 98FE constantly had BSOD but 98SE quickly came out. Most had upgrade editions. We went from 3.1 to 95 to 98 so if you needed to redo it we had to go all the way back to MS DOS to install 3.1 and work from there.