“This mess is unusually poor, even by the oftend disjointed standards of messaging by Microsoft”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” So wrote Charles Dickens of the grand announcement of Windows 11, by the team bosses and The Big Cheese Nadella himself. Let’s cover the worst of times first.

What went wrong? A lot. The live stream from Microsoft was an unmitigated disaster of stalling video, disconnections and technical issues. The very thing that a demonstration of your world-leading competence in cloud services should not do. “Scale out! Scale up!” has been the common rallying cry. It didn’t, and didn’t.

Fortunately, I found a feed on YouTube that gave me access to the ongoing event. We’ll skip over the over-wrought emotional nonsense, about how Windows is all about bringing together *croaking throat* loved ones and their dogs. Instead, let’s dive into the beta that’s now available for all to play with. You have to sign up to be a Windows Insider build tester (insider.windows.com), but this is easy enough. Once you’ve done this, the new build trundles down onto your computer and the upgrade is done for you.

Well, that’s the theory. Let’s get on to the real “worst of times” about all of this. Of all the things that Microsoft could have got