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."

Comments

Re:Hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

>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.

Re:They have a point

[SirSmiley]

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

It's MS, not Apple

[Moraelin]

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.