The Microsoft Mojave Experiment

Posted by miguelcarrasco in Friday, August 1st 2008   
Topics: Real World News
5 Comments

The Ad Campaign Microsoft Should be Running on Television

Vista Vista has gotten ridiculous amounts of bad press, although the press releases pretty much sound like when XP first came out.  It’s funny as more and more people actually start upgrading to Vista, you start hearing comments like “Vista isn’t that bad eh? I actually really like it!  It’s pretty fast and looks awesome.  I love the instant search!”. 

Microsoft seems to have figured out a pretty neat way of re-educating a few people with their latest web site http://www.mojaveexperiment.com.  Hopefully they start running these advertisements on TV, they are pretty good!

Vista is a new operating system, and everyone seems to be on the “bash vista” bandwagon, including a ton of Microsofties so I don’t want to burst the “bash vista” bubble, but I’ve been running Vista at home as my PVR without a single issue for nearly 6 months.  My wife runs vista and doesn’t have any problems, and I run it on my desktop at home and love it.

Is it possible that with all the bad press of how Vista is terrible, and all the Macintosh commercials about how Vista is terrible, actually worked?  Maybe the company that did the PR for Vista is really to blame, and not Vista itself?

Microsoft set out to find out, when they ran the Mojave Experiment.  In a brilliant move, they sat people in front of the new Microsoft OS Mojave, and let them try it out!  First they asked the participants to rate Windows Vista.  Most rated 0 out of 10, and said it was terrible.  Next, Microsoft employees showed them “Mojave”, the new OS after Vista, and showed off all its cool features and asked them to rate Mojave.  What was their response?  Pretty much 10 out of 10.  The best part is at the end however!  Mojave is Vista.  And the people are mostly left speechless and don’t know what to say.

Vista isn’t without its issues, but after SP1, I’m confident in saying I would choose Vista over XP any day.

Check out the Mojave Experiment for yourself!

If you liked this article, please share it on DZone, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Digg. I’d appreciate it.

Related Post

Spread the word

Digg this post

Bookmark to delicious

Stumble the post

DZone This Post

DotNetKick This Post

Add to your technorati favourite

Subscribes to this post

This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.

5 users responded to this post

Anthony said in August 4th, 2008 at 2:07 pm    

I think I came down closer to Wil Shipley’s opinion on the Mojave experiment:

http://wilshipley.com/blog/2008/07/mojave-experiment-bad-science-bad.html

In short, they’d probably be better off forgetting that they actually spent time engineering a “gotcha!” scenario for potential customers.

Johnny said in August 9th, 2008 at 1:30 am    

Lets first start with the fact that I am a MS network system engineer / Administrator.. and I’ve built quite a few hot rod systems from scratch. So I do know my way around both software and hardware.

Choose vista over XP any day? Please are you serious.
Im running Vista Ultimate 64 bit on a high end HP laptop with the latest updates. Its a blue screen machine.
Especially when I try and watch the olympics with silverlight. I get about 5-10 minutes of video before a bluescreen.
Its ridiculous. It shuts down all the time.

Ive run XP pro for what.. 6 years now and I have yet to have ONE BSOD on it.

I like the looks of vista…
but with its BSOD problems.. and its SERIOUSLY DISGUSTING copy/paste and file transfer performance.. this thing is ten steps BACK from XP.

Harry said in August 23rd, 2008 at 9:24 am    

I’ve been using Vista on a low end ($855 with a printer and camera) HP laptop since December 2007. I bought it reluctantly. (I wanted to be smart and stick with XP.) It has the minimumm amount of RAM needed for Vista (2GB) and isn’t upgradable. It is far from a “blue screen machine.” I can’t remember the last time I saw a blue screen. It rarely crashes and when a program does crash it doesn’t take the whole OS down with it. I run obscure legacy software on it. I use MS Word 2003. I like it. It runs better than my old Toshiba laptop running XP with 1.5 GB of RAM. That crashed more often than this Vista laptop.

I pointed out to a supposedly savvy friend of mine that I was using Vista and he started right in on bashing it. He complained it wasn’t networkable, etc., etc. He was amazed when I told him all he had to do was download a simple patch to his XP machine for it to “see” the Vista machine and I got Office 2003 going the same way. Don’t people ever “Google” their problems? If they did, they might find their insurmountable problem has a really simple solution.

I’ll have no qualms buying Vista on future systems.

LTs Joe said in September 16th, 2008 at 11:24 am    

Microsoft figures it’s cheaper to try to … ahem..”re-educate” all of us on Vista rather than make an OS that actually works. The Mojave Project is nothing more than a PR stunt. Let the people use the computers for a month instead of just showing them a heavily managed 10 minute demo. And how come there’s only 55 responses out of 120 people? What about the other 65? See, even under perfect conditions Vista couldn’t make the grade.

And for people who like Vista? Well that’s easy: They’re PAID to like Vista. No one would actually use that garbage otherwise. Cut their kickbacks from MS and see what they say.

Don’t fear the penguin! Use a real OS. Long live LINUX!

Leave Your Comments Below

«
»