In order to prevent confusion among coders and scripters.
When scripting a search for a system by operating system, many coders (older programs) and scripters will use a wildcard to catch both Windows 95 and Windows 98. This would be coded as such:
get-adcomputer -filter {operatingsystem -like “Windows9*”}
This PowerShell command would get you all computers in Active Directory that are either Windows 95 or 98. (note: shame on you if you have Windows 95 or 98 joined to you domain.) If they released the new OS as Windows 9, they would’ve been caught up in those results, which would be a royal pain to sort through for accurate results.
That makes sense. I vaguely recall a year-old theory that it was a marketing ploy to try to confuse OS X with Win 10.