Windows 11 Field Guide: Looking to the Future

Now that I’ve added tons of new 23H2 content to the Windows 11 Field Guide, Microsoft is, of course, prepping a major quarterly update to this system. It’s called Moment 5 (M5) internally, and though we’ve known most of the expected changes for weeks, the full list is, as yet, not clear. But no matter. It’s time for me to figure out how and where I need to update the book. Again.

Semi-unrelated to this, the Windows 11 Field Guide has ballooned to nearly 1,100 pages in PDF format, and it has long been unwieldy. This size, combined with the way Microsoft is rapidly updating the platform, makes it difficult for me to keep up. I have a few ideas about how to mitigate that, but for now, let me outline the biggest challenges, some of which aren’t particularly new or recent.

Microsoft Edge. Microsoft ships a new version of its web browser every four weeks. That’s an aggressive schedule, and there are often new features, some of which change the user interface. In the good news department, this schedule is at least predictable. That’s not true of the other issues noted below.

Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft added this AI assistant to Windows 11 in 23H2 (basically), but like many recent Windows-related features, it shipped in incomplete form and Microsoft is now racing to add new features. I’ve already written two versions of the Copilot chapter, but the expected M5 additions, plus other feature updates (like this one) mean I’ll be rewriting it yet again. And this won’t stop: With the emphasis Microsoft has put on AI, it’s clear I’ll be updating this chapter repeatedly for the foreseeable future.

Out-of-band updates. Microsoft promised that it would ship one Feature Update for Windows 11 each year, but it also releases Moment updates each quarter, each of which adds several to dozens of new features. Additionally, it can and does ship individual new features almost every single month. These updates can come to the system or to individual apps. And sometimes they are very disruptive for me: After very little testing, Microsoft recently changed the location of the Copilot icon in the Taskbar, which screwed up several hundred screenshots I had taken for 23H2, forcing me to re-take a lot of them. (I’m only partially done with that and, let’s face it, I’ll never finish this work regardless.)

Aside from the buckets of new features in 23H2 and, soon, in M5, I still have a backlog of chapters and other content to add to the book. This to-do list includes topics that date back a few years, like the Windows Recovery Environment, Windows PowerShell, the Windows Insider Program, Windows on Arm, and several others. But also newer topics like Microsoft Outlook (New) and Dev Home, and literally dozens of smaller topics that can find their way into existing chapters. Basically, it never ends.

When I started writing the Windows 11 Field Guide in mid-2022, I designed it to be a complete reference to the system that would take up about 500 pages in PDF format. But I wanted the book to be even shorter, perhaps 400 pages. And … that didn’t happen, obviously. When the first e-book version shipped in October 2022, it was already 375 pages long and by early 2023, it was over 650 pages long. Today, as noted, it’s closing in on 1,100 pages.

This isn’t what I want. It’s possibly not what you want, either. But I’ve been working through what it means to simplify and shorten the book. And I think that may be the right approach, though the notion of taking away content that people paid for is problematic. One idea is to create a shorter subset of the book—a Windows 11 Pocket Field Guide, if you will. This would be more action-oriented—the top changes and least well-known features, perhaps with a list at the top of each chapter summarizing what’s there—but it would also, semi-obviously, be more work, not less: I’d have to maintain two books going forward and keep them in sync.

I will continue trying to figure out a go-forward plan that makes sense. And as I approach whatever new/updated topics arriving in the coming weeks and months, I will continue thinking about what it means to put the Windows 11 Field Guide on a diet. This is, I think, overdue. But please let me know what you think.

Thanks!