At GUADEC, a European convention for GNOME developers in Madrid, developers Xan Lopez and Juan Jose Sanchez have laid out plans for the future development of GNOME. Version 3.12 of the Linux desktop environment will be released as GNOME 4.0 in March 2014. Around that time, there should be a specific Linux distribution focused on GNOME OS as well.
GNOME 4.0 will not see many big changes from previous releases. GNOME shell and several GNOME applications will be more polished, but the real challenge will be to optimize the system for touch-enabled devices. More ambitious are the plans for GNOME OS, which include a new installer, an update tool and hardware with GNOME OS pre-installed. In order to commercialize the platform more, the plans also include an app store, cloud-based services and new support services. To make GNOME 4.0 more interesting to software developers, an SDK is coming, with a focus on desktop applications, as well as internet based applications.
In 2005 developers set a goal for GNOME to have a market share of 10% by 2010. Although that never happened, this time they want to reach a global market share of a "modest" 20% by 2020, thanks to all the previous and future changes to the platform.
Source: Phoronix