What do You Think of the Mojave Experiment?
August 28, 2008 by Rico Mossesgeld
Filed under Desktops, Laptops
The Mojave Experiment is Microsoft’s latest marketing ploy. Participants—who are said to have never used or apparently even seen Vista—are asked what they think about the operating system. Afterwards, they’re shown a 10-minute demo of Microsoft’s “newest” OS, codenamed “Mojave”. It’s only after the presentation’s done are the participants told that Mojave is actually Windows Vista. They’re asked once again to rate Vista.
The campaign makes use of videos, which show with full detail the reactions of most of the participants as they’re wowed by what they’re seeing. It’s clear that Microsoft thinks that the numerous challenges faced by Vista aren’t caused by real issues, but by a widely held perception that the OS is plagued by bugs, slowdowns, and incompatibilities. Not surprisingly the experiment paints a very positive picture for Vista.
A New Approach for Microsoft
Mojave represents a new step for Microsoft, in terms of marketing. Its personal approach and reliance on traditional customer testimonials is very different from the software company’s usually business-like methods. At the very least, it attempts to address the widespread view that it’s simply not worth upgrading to Vista, and the relative popularity of downgrading to XP.
Vista is Still Vista
Granted, recent experiences have shown that Vista features a lot of improvements that make navigating and browsing through your information a lot easier. A wonderful example is the “breadcrumbs” explorer address bar.
And of course, you also have the vastly improved eye candy. The problem with Vista has always been its performance—how fast it does things. Recent experiences have also shown that even relatively powerful computers, advertised as designed for Vista, don’t really let users maximize their computing experience.
Microsoft Needs to Get its Act Together Fast
It’s easy for Microsoft to blame customer error, the failure of hardware vendors to provide the proper hardware, and even Apple’s Mac OS X advertising campaigns for the negative reputation Windows Vista suffers today.
The fact remains though that Vista represents a step backward for Microsoft, and actually threatens to weaken its dominance in the operating system industry, as frustrated users look for alternatives from competitors. It’s good that Microsoft is trying to craft the presentation of its message to be more relevant to John Q. Public, but it needs to back-up this with action. Here’s to hoping that the Windows Vista SP2 upgrade really fixes things.
I don’t get it. I love Vista. I feel that it has really helped me with my productivity, especially the “search” function.
I’ve seen these ads and I find them highly suspect. You are given no parameters about the “experiment”. What controls were used, how was this presented to the “participants”, how many of the “participants” responded just as negatively to Vista as the ones of us that have experience with it that weren’t shown? In other words, it is nothing more than a commercial from Microsoft presented just the way MS wants it presented.
The experiment was to prove that people have false impressions of Windows Vista. That’s it! The experiment was a success.
The problem with all windows’ is that it never seems to be an OS built from the users perspective. When there is a problem windows will tell me to go to some 7th tier properties menu in control panel & then come back when Ive checked a box. How about a shortcut? Or even worse fling up that useless help & support thing. Was this answer useful? Start over? Or even worse error reporting, Tell Microsoft about your error. Guess what? Microsoft knows & they don’t care about your driver incompatibility or your mic settings.
& Phil, I agree that the search function works great but for the love of god, its a simple search function, it should have always worked.
If the experiment was *just* to prove that people have false impressions of Vista, I think I would agree, but the experiment was to tell people they are wrong. “See…Vista works great. Bug Free. All those news articles about the problems and all those IT departments with professionals downgrading are wrong because Vista rocks.”
Personally I am going to stick to XP and my macs.
I still hate Vista. And you know what? Because of this Mojave experiment, I hate it even more.
I’ve tried Vista, I’ve used Vista. By itself, it’s fine, really. But whenever Microsoft releases a new OS, it always ends up slowing down the performance of the system I’m using at that time.
As some of you may have noticed, I’m a gamer. See the blog shown when mousing over my name? I take the performance of my PC seriously. So even if I don’t update my machine every six months, I still want to make the most out of it.
Vista causes my two-year old PC to slow down significantly. As a result, I went back to XP. And the price I pay? I don’t get to play Halo 2 and Shadowrun, which aren’t really that great to begin with.
If I ever did get a new PC, I would still stick with XP because I could get much better gains there, compared to the incremental improvements offered by Vista. Sure, there are new features that impress a lot of people, but to gamers, speed is top priority.
I think the people that Microsoft included in this “experiment” of theirs are either paid, or are completely clueless as to what Vista truly is. M$ should have gotten more gamers and PC geeks. Then again, their “experiment” won’t be as favorable if they did that.
I’m in IT, and manage a mixed network consisting primarily of XP desktops, but also a few Vista desktops and laptops, a few MacBooks, a couple of Ubuntu Linux desktops, a Linux print server, and a Linux web server. Based on my experience, the easiest OSes to work with are XP and Linux.
Linux is by far the most flexible and configurable and fairly easy to use. XP is easy to use and hard for users to break (assuming it’s set up properly and regular users aren’t using an Administrator account). Mac OS X isn’t really that bad, but Apple has an odd way of doing certain things that doesn’t always mesh well with other systems without jumping through a few hoops.
Vista, however, is an IT nightmare. I’ve had to deal with numerous compatibility issues, even on systems that came with Vista pre-installed. It doesn’t seem to work very well with other systems. Installation, particularly on a RAID system, is a huge hassle. And the overly-zealous User Account Control is a continual headache. The recent service pack helped some, but not nearly enough to make me want to ever install Vista on one of my personal computers.
That being said, the people who use the Vista machines like them. Vista looks pretty, and does have some nice features, like the search integrated into the Start menu and the breadcrumb navigation in the Explorer address bar. But these users also don’t have to administer these computers. If these were their personal computers, and had to manage them and install software and such themselves, they might have a slightly different opinion.
As for myself, I have two computers at home: a fairly new laptop and an older desktop. The desktop came with XP preinstalled, and while I initially formatted the drives and reinstalled XP to clean off the junkware that came with it, I haven’t seen any reason to change from XP. The laptop, however, came with Vista preinstalled. Upon purchasing it, I called the manufacturer, told them I refused to accept the Windows EULA, and demanded a refund (as per the EULA). I was refunded $150. I then installed Ubuntu Linux (for free). That was six months ago, and I don’t plan on changing anytime soon.