Microsoft wants you to calm down about Windows 11 (in a twisted, wonderful way) | ZDNet

You’ve barely slept, right?

You’ve spent so much time thinking about it that you’ve hardly been able to focus on a single Zoom call. I mean, Teams call.

Your family is ignoring you and your dog once even tried to feed you.

I bring you good news. Microsoft understands how excited you are at witnessing the next edition of the software that has become your most useful limb, Windows.

Windows 11 is allegedly to be unveiled on June 24 and, frankly, that’s just too many days, isn’t it? So Microsoft has decided to speak directly to you and offer you a calming tincture. More precisely, a calming timbre. Even more precisely, several.

Redmond has just released an 11-minute aural homage to Windows gone by.

This is how Microsoft explains itself: “Having trouble relaxing because you’re too excited for the June 24th Microsoft Event? Take a slow trip down memory lane with the Windows 95, XP, and 7 startup sound.”

Now that’s something you wish you’d thought of yourself, isn’t it? You wish you could remember the noises that surrounded Windows XP.

But have Microsoft’s fine engineers really spent their time creating a tune from all those wonderful sounds that always woke you up, even when you were at your worst?

Yes, they have. And how.

For here are all those startup noises, slowed down by 4,000%.

This creates a mesmeric humming in your head that drifts from one ear to the other. And back again.

It’s as if Philip Glass, Steve Reich and several Microsoft engineers decided to have a jam session that involved a certain sort of vaping and one rather old church organ.

It seems as if Microsoft is following Google in its thinking.

Not too long ago, Google created a four-and-a-half minute video to help Pixel users practice mindfulness while their data was being transferred to their new phone.

It’s heartening that vast tech companies are thinking of their customers’ emotions at such pivotal moments in their lives.

It has, indeed, incited an idea in my distant parts.

What happens when the new Windows is revealed? Shouldn’t Microsoft prepare some sort of tech-infused Hallelujah Chorus if Windows 11 is universally adored?

And shouldn’t it also prepare a new calming ditty for those who might feel the new operating system sounds an unwelcome clang in several of their inner workings?