Microsoft's "Mojave Experiment" Teaser Site Goes Live

MojoKid writes "Earlier this week, Microsoft was reported to be arranging a kind of 'blind taste test' to get die-hard Windows XP users to try Vista. They were told that they were trying a new OS, called Mojave. The report went on to suggest that users liked the OS, though they were actually running Vista. Now it appears Microsoft has put up a teaser site, with plans to show the actual video footage next week. Though the footage should at least have some entertainment value, it would be a bit of a reach to expect that the test methodologies were real-world enough such that users had to deal with things like user account control, driver updates, and broad application compatibility."

Only Vista?

Why didn't they give the users multiple flavors of the most colorful operating systems they never tried (Vista, OSX, Kubuntu, etc) and ask them which one they liked best?

They gave them Vista and asked them if they liked it... That doesn't say much because nobody (most importantly THEY) knows if they'd like OSX more.

Re:Only Vista?

Why didn't they give the users multiple flavors of the most colorful operating systems they never tried (Vista, OSX, Kubuntu, etc) and ask them which one they liked best?

Why? Oh I don't know really.. Maybe because Microsoft doesn't want to publish something that says that users like Mac OS X best?

Re:Only Vista?

Great PR job. I KNEW the Iraqi Minister of Information would land on his feet somewhere.

Seems desperate

I think this is a bad move by Microsoft. It only makes them seem desperate. By making this viral campaign, they openly admit that vista so far has failed in the consumer market.

This campaign really focus on the wrong issues. The main complaints over vista has never been that it isn't shiny and dazzling enough. The problems was that it makes older hardware painfully slow, the UAC annoyance, incompatible drivers etc. These are not things that a user notices in a 10 minute demo. This campaign shows nothing.

10 minutes?

So... it just finished booting up?

Marketing Reboot

Microsoft may got something here.
I don't think Vista's requirements are a problem at all for people with at least a 2 year old pc.
Vista's main problem is marketing related. They didn't stick with only one household version (ultimate) like OS X does, instead they offer you 10 versions like "starter, home basic, home premium" and people gets irritated and confused.
This Mohave thing looks like a facelift making the product less microsoftish and more Web 2.0/Apple inclined.
It may work with people who got seducted with a Macbook if they cash in good press, enough ads and TV spots.

Desperation?

This smacks of some desperation on Microsoft's part. I mean, if they have to avoid telling people they're using Vista, then they're acknowledging there's a negative perception of the OS out there.

And this, IMHO, is what trips software makers up. If your product is perceived negatively, then you'd damn well better find out why and fix it. I've said this about OpenOffice for a while now. Is it slow? Maybe a little. Not terrible to me, but maybe a little, and there are certainly some people who think so. So try and work on that. The same goes for Vista. For better or worse, people don't like it, so find out why and address those issues. Don't just try to convince people that their opinions are wrong.

The problem, of course, is that MS has invested tons of money in Vista. Whether it's a turkey or not, it's perceived that way, and MS realizes it, hence this site. But when people have made up their minds, it won't be easy to solve the problem simply by telling them they're wrong. Address their complaints instead, and you might convince them.

Hands-off experience with an OS

The report does say that the test subjects never had hands-on experience with the OS.

Having a hands-off experience with an OS is like examining a car in the showroom: its mileage is just great as long as you don't start the engine.

In addition, my guess is that that Microsoft ensured favourable test conditions (top-of-the-line hardware, plenty of Ram, hardware graphics acceleration, and a nice clean install without crapware).

This "Mojave" demonstration might be good publicity though, but only as long as people don't start to question what exactly was shown and whether or not Microsoft provided unrealistically favourable test conditions. For one thing seems pretty obvious: Microsoft didn't use a $498 Dell computer from Wallmart as a test platform.

Rest assured, it's like the coke tests

You remember the coke ads where the "randomly selected" participants invariably chose coke over the other brand? No, really? What did you think you see, a "representative average"? Or just the ones that actually chose coke, no matter whether that was 90 or 10 percent of the people "tested"?

It's like those "interviews" where they try to show just how dumb the average Joe is. Go out on the street with a world map and let people point out Iraq. Sure, 90% might find it, but when you only show the 10% who search for ages and finally point to India or even Florida, you "show" just how dumb the population is.

But let's for a moment assume that yes, 90 percent of their participants said that Vista is nice. Ok, it is. Hey, it sure looks great. Especially when you offer nothing to compare it to. Give someone who's hungry a Hamburger and he'll tell you it's great. Especially when you don't offer him some steak at the same time.

The right way to conduct such a test ....

The right way to conduct such a test would be to pull a random low-end, Vista-certified PC from the shelf at Wal-Mart or Best Buy and then see what happens, starting with the unboxing process.

One of the many ways in which Microsoft aimed a BFG9000 at its own feet was certifying hardware incapable of running Vista. Hundreds of thousands of laptops were shipped with 512MB of memory. "First run" on such a system can take up to 45 minutes as Vista actually has to install itself first. Then the machine is so crippled by lack of RAM that even running Solitaire is interrupted by wild disk activity accompanied by random lockups of the user interface.

If you want to run Vista, you need to spend the price of an Macintosh on the hardware. And if you're going to do that, you might as well get a Mac in the first place.

There's nothing wrong with those half-gig laptops, by the way. They're great when running Ubuntu.

I hate Vista, I have tried it.

I am one of those who falls into the "die hard XP" group.

I DID try Vista. I gave it a fair dinkum go, and here's my story. I even sang it's praises for a short time (up until about point 4, which was less than 1 month in)

- Bought Vista, and an extra 1GB of memory, as I knew I'd need it.

- Installed Vista, installation and activation went smoothly.

- Had pain with sound card drivers (Creative SB Audigy 2). Couldn't change between headphones / speakers without relaunching every application that played sound. Very annoying.

- World of Warcraft (and other games) could not be run in Window mode without huge performance penalties. Found could alt-tab out of full screen with little of the normal delay you get when alt-tabbing out

- Discovered leaving a full screen 3D app alt-tabbed for more than a few minutes resulted in that app being inaccessible, requiring process kill.

- Decided to upgrade video card to get a performance boost. Vista required activation because I changed video cards. Couldn't be activated over the net, had to call Microsoft directly during business hours to get it turned back on. Ended up having to call from work and use remote desktop to enter the code supplied. WTF?

- A few days later, decided to get a second identical video card to get better performance (yay SLI!) No activation needed this time thankfully.

- Discovered Vista wouldn't run my video cards in SLI mode. Discovered BIOS update to fix this... installed it.

- Discovered despite the fix, Vista still wasn't running anything in SLI mode.

- Installed Ubuntu to dual-boot into. Discovered Ubuntu would quite happily run my video cards in SLI mode.

- Spent several nights googling, and testing things to get SLI working

- Formatted, re-installed Windows XP... no problems since.

Re:Hardware

>They were probably running on top of the range hardware as well, a grahics card with 1GB of RAM, system with 4GB of RAM and a Quad core processor etc..

Except that they were not. The linked site says they were running on HP dv2000 with 2Gb RAM.

I've never understood this....

My (limited) Vista experience is on a laptop with Celeron CPU, 1Gb RAM and Intel graphics.

It seemed to run just fine to me, Aero included.

I wounldn't have Vista for other reasons but maybe Microsoft is right - people like you need to take a second look.

Re:makes you wonder

Repeat the experiment with a "Vista Capable" set of hardware, the stuff MS is getting sued over.

Re:makes you wonder

I just did another downgrade from Vista to XP this week. A friend bought a brand new PC from Wal-Mart with Vista on it. He couldn't stand the fact that his 5-year-old machine at work running XP was more responsive than his brand new Vista box.

He wanted the downgrade bad enough that he traded me several XBox games to do the work. That is saying something right there. When I asked him if he liked the features on Vista he looked at me quizzically and scratched his head.

Never let bling interfere with usability. The "ooh, shiny" of fancy graphics and widgets lasts only a moment. On the other hand, usability issues will become increasingly frustrating over time.

Re:makes you wonder

I had serious problems on my Quad G5 when I upgraded to Leopard 10.5.0 from Tiger OS X (10.4). I kept reporting bugs to bugreporter.apple.com , stay away from any third party enhancement until something stable ships (from Apple!) and tried my best to report third party quirks.

It has nothing to do with Vista of course except one thing.

Apple actually admits the issues (which effects me) and asks for more information, samples of processes, attached USB drives list.

Now after such love-hate relationship, 10.5.4 (think like SP4) became way better on Tiger in some aspects. You also feel like someone out there cares for your issues. Whether they fix or not, that is another issue. MS have driven people to such paranoia (with Genunine advantage) that people tweaks their paid operating system NOT to send kernel crash reports.

MS won't admit any issues and does such crazy things like claiming people having problems are actually "psychologically" having them and set a site for it even. The root of problem is that.

Random, cheap hardware is their problem too. E.g. Apple did a very interesting (not sure if intentional) thing to get rid of broken RAMs. Either 10.3.x or 10.4.x (I guess 10.3) does a RAM test, a hardcore one silently and basically falls to black screen if RAM broken. Would MS dare to do such a thing? Please note that it is an experience and various random Apple service center/sales guys quote. There is no such "We are testing your RAM and will fail if it is broken" status message in installler :)

Re:makes you wonder

The biggest problem with many discount PCs is that they typically come with very small amounts of RAM, 1 GB (sometimes even 512MB).
.

The $349 Vista Basic desktop at Walmart.com ships with 2 GB RAM

Walmart.com has 30 Vista desktops and 20 Vista desktops that ship with at least 2 GB RAM. 3 or 4 GB is not uncommon. 64-bit Vista is gaining visibility as well.

The 512 MB PC runs XP Home or - wait for it - Linux.

This follows a depressingly familiar pattern. The moment OEM Linux begins to gain some traction, hardware prices fall and the Windows system with eye-popping specs becomes suddenly very affordable.

Re:makes you wonder

Are you suggesting that Microsoft would actually go through the trouble of "stacking the deck"? The very same Microsoft whose presentations are famous with the likes of Bill Gates plugging in a scanner and getting the BSOD in front of the whole planet? To suggest this would suggest that Microsoft has learned from their mistakes which I find unlikely. In order to learn from your mistakes, you have to first admit to yourself that you even MADE a mistake which is not something Microsoft is known for doing. In fact, this whole exercise is about trying to say "you guys are all just prejudiced against Vista! You never gave it a fair chance!" rather than admitting to themselves that Vista is a mistake and that cutting off WindowsXP is an even bigger one.

It's MS, not Apple

Actually, you have to distinguish between

1. what MS's PR/propaganda machine does to the outside world, and

2. what MS does internally.

I remember the story linked to on Slashdot, where basically to get any new product and technology done at MS, you had to go in front of Bill Gates, hear him say that it's the dumbest thing he ever heard, then tell him that he's wrong and you're sure of it. Pretty much everything that was done at MS past some point, was done by people who told Bill Gates to his face that he's wrong or made a mistake.

It's not Apple, where everything is supposedly done because of The Great Man Steve Jobs, and everything is because of The Great Man's vision, and He is never wrong. At MS everything was done _in_ _spite_ of Bill Gates's vision to the contrary. Or at least so went that little game internally.

Their invasion of the Internet, going with DirectX instead of OpenGL, etc, etc, etc, were done by people who went in front of Bill Gates and told him that he's wrong.

And there were enough cases where they switched directions in mid-flight, instead of ploughing ahead to the hilt. E.g., they weren't going to do any Internet support, they wanted to make their own proprietary network. Some ex-Borland guy went to Bill and told him that it's a mistake, and the rest is history.

Heck, from the very beginning there's the story of the new guy who went to Bill Gates to tell him that the flood-fill function in MS Basic is crap and needs to be rewritten. So he got asked to write a better one then. Turns out that that function was written by Bill himself.

Now the PR bullshit they spew on the outside world, is a whole different story. And the kind of PR stunt in TFA _is_ probably their work. Though even that one occasionally admits that an older product had bad parts. E.g., see the Clippy spiel when they finally got rid of that annoyance.

Or you'll notice that there are more dumb ideas than that, which got silently discontinued. E.g., MS Bob. Now that was a fuckup. I don't see them still pushing it instead of admitting that it didn't work.

Now mind you, I'm not saying that MS is anywhere near perfect or ideal in any form or shape or aspect. But they do realize that sometimes things don't work as formerly planned, and some are just mistakes. You don't get to be a mega-corporation that size by being keeping doing a mistake just to not admit it.

But again, admitting it to the outside world, now that's a whole other problem. Of course they're not going to say Vista is crap, as long as they don't have a replacement. But they _are_ already working on Windows 7 and on the SP1 for Vista, and I'd be surprised if they didn't include some of the lessons learned in the design of both.

Vista ... rocks?

So, microsoft disguised vista as a good operating system... why don't they do that for EVERYONE?

Re:Vista ... rocks?

Vista is like Chili and Whiskey. It might seem good when it's on the tongue, but your ass will be sore in the morning.

Re:Vista isnt that bad really.

yet my powerbook G4 from 2003 can run an OS with all the features of Aero, shadows, full screen , semi transparent menus etc just fine. You could install ubuntu with full compiz functionality on the same hardware as you have now.

Aero shouldn't require a third of the resources that it does, and should run just fine on your laptop. The fact that it doesn't is indicative of Vista's poor design.

Re:They have a point

I recently installed vista ultimate 64 bit on my athlon 3800 dual core and upgraded to 4 gig of ram so i needed a 64 bit os to take full advantage...the 32 bit xp could only recognize 3.37 gig...im thinking of going back to xp and using the 3.37 gig because vista is definitely using more ram and the performance is actually worse. Bootup time is simply unacceptable, it is about three times longer than xp if not four. That is with a 32meg cache on a new 500 gig sata2 seagate barracuda v 11 drive. Running apps take on average 2-4 times longer to open

Re:They have a point

Ok, I'm going to call you on these - but first, some background.

When Vista came out, I didn't immediately jump onto it - I had no need, I was using Macs exclusively at home and XP exclusively at work, I had no spare time to 'play' with an OS.

In the past year my work role changed drastically - I was no longer the legacy systems developer that I had been for 5 years, I was moving into infrastructure support - so I decided it was time to buy a Windows laptop (Windows on bootcamp is not really decent for heavy usage, Apple haven't done a stellar job with the drivers).

So I went out and bought an XPS M1530 - 2GB ram, Core2Duo T7500. It came with Vista Home Premium. SP1 got put on as soon as the laptop hit my desk.

My first thought was 'Ok, get the drivers for XP and lets install XP Pro'. Only I didn't have the time, so I put it off. And then I kept finding other things to do, so it kept getting put off.

Until, eventually, it was several months later and I realised that Vista wasn't living up to its Slashdot hype - it wasn't getting in my way, I didn't have a slow system, it wasn't crashing, none of my apps were having issues, UAC was staying out of my way and only making an appearance when I *expected* it to make an appearance etc etc. In short, I sat back and realised there wasn't any reason for me to actually go back to XP Pro.

So here I sit, XPS in front of me, iMac on its pedistool over on one corner of the desk, Macbook Pro on another pedistool on the other corner of the desk, and a Dell Vostro 200 sat under the desk running Windows Server 2008 Standard. And I couldn't be happier.

Now, to address your points:

1. If you are having problems with the preinstalled software, that indicates a problem with your OEMs install more than anything - if several applications are all vying for the same job, I would expect a mess on any platform.
2. The power management works perfectly for me, it tells me when the batteries are low and it places the XPS into the right state for the right battery level. Even when the laptop is sleeping anyway. You can right click on the tray expansion icon and select which System Icons to always display - and Power is one of them (for me its ticked by default).
3. My XPS seems to happily speed step as required, and the laptop certainly doesn't get as hot as the Macbook Pro does.
4. I haven't yet had a problem with IE7 - certainly not anything that makes it impossible to use. I tend to use IE, Firefox and Safari about equally on this system.
5. Wireless works effortlessly for myself - on my travels I tend to roam between several networks (home, work, friends, BT Openzone etc etc) and setting up the new network is painless, and I have never had to reset one up after the first connection.

So, sorry but your assertion that 'Problems with Vista that you notice very quickly (but not in 10 minutes)' haven't yet applied to myself after several months of usage.

Now, its sad but all I am expecting in reply to this is the standard 'M$ shill' response - I'm no shill, just someone that hasn't had a problem.

Re:In other news

What's your point? That's the way unix is supposed to work. Many isolated processes communicating over pipes. That's why it's so stable compared to windows. If one piece fails, it just restarts, and everything is back to normal. Even when OS X locks up, happens once in a blue moon, it's usually only the UI, the unix subsystem keeps on trucking.