July 29, 2008

The "Mojave Experiment": It's about friggin time!

For many years now I have been a fan of Vista. I have been using it since the early betas way before the public saw it, and I have seen the goods, the bads, and the uglies as it progressed to commercial release. I find I am much more productive than I ever was on XP, and appreciate that for the first time, I can actually run as a standard user in a Windows operating system without serious hacks to get it to work.

Vista has one failing above all else that has hurt it over the last few years though. And that is poor release delays and missed expectations from Microsoft, along with loud mouth anti-vista commercials, comments and posts from people who REALLY have no idea what they are talking about. Is Vista perfect? No. But its nowhere near as bad as people want you to believe. Apple did a great job to muddy the airwaves with their antivista ads... so much so many of us in the MVP community were fuming. Almost borderline slanderous in some of its mis-information, the ads did an amazing job to make people rethink upgrading.

All the while Microsoft stayed quiet. Personally, it drove me batty. Why would they sit there and take such punishment? Excluding the name calling the industry was enjoying, they were punching 'em in the nards (so to speak). Again and again. Constantly. And Microsoft wouldn't fight back.

Well, Microsoft struck back recently. Nothing flashy. Nothing sleezy. They held an experiment. They disguised Windows Vista as codename "Mojave", the next "Microsoft OS", and had regular people who have never tried Vista give it a shot... all the while secretly filming them.

A candid camera coup!!!

And it worked. Here are some interesting stats from the Mojave Experiment:

  • 89% of the users expressed satisfaction with Mojave
  • 83% will recommend Mojave to friends and family
  • 94% rated Mojave higher than they initially rated Vista before seeing it in action. None rated it lower.
  • Of the 140 people polled, on a scale of 1:10 where 10 was the highest rating, the average pre-rating for Vista was 4.4. After seeing the demo, they rated Mojave with 8.5. Many said they would have rated it higher, but they wanted a chance to play with it more first.

So imagine the surprise when the users found out it was actually Vista that they were using! I love it. Check out some of the videos to see the user comments, in their own words, and determine for yourself if Vista is as bad as you have heard.

So go check out The "Mojave Experiment" already!

Posted by SilverStr at July 29, 2008 01:35 PM | TrackBack
Comments

From the technical perspective, Vista is great (non-admin users, GPU driven GUI, integrated search, etc.), but for the normal user, who don't care about this stuff, Vista is not worth upgrading (and I have to agree with them)

I think that Vista is a step in the road. Next release MS must concentrate in adding value to the OS (ie: stunning apps out of the box, faster, same drivers than Vista)

Posted by: edddy at July 29, 2008 02:27 PM

I wonder what the ratings would have been like if instead of bringing in people for a demo, Microsoft had actually installed Vista on the subjects' own computers and let them use it for a week.

And I wonder what the ratings would have been like if Mojave actually turned out to be Mac OSX or Ubuntu.

Calling this an "experiment" is an insult to social science.

Posted by: David Schrag at July 30, 2008 07:54 AM

I hope that people aren't thinking that this is "real" science or anything other than marketing. I personally like Vista just fine, but MS seems to have taken a page from the 'whopper experiment' and the pepsi taste challenge for this. Hit http://wilshipley.com/blog/2008/07/mojave-experiment-bad-science-bad.html for someone far more eloquent than I explaining it.

Posted by: Arcterex at July 30, 2008 09:29 AM

I have to disagree with the comment from Eddy. I work for Microsoft (in the spirit of transparency) and worked on the Vista launch as a software evangelist (I presented Vista to audiences). I think there are plenty of features for the "normal user" that make Vista a worthwhile upgrade. They CERTAINLY make sense when purchasing a new PC. Instant search, for instance, is a great addition to the product. The new and improved backup features benefit the "normal user" far more than IT departments.

In fact, in a recent attempt to outline exactly this point, I have started a series of blog posts entitled "Why Vista." You can find them by clicking on my name (under this post).

Keep up the good work, Dana.

Thanks!
Dan

Posted by: Dan Woodman at July 30, 2008 04:16 PM