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

makes you wonder

[walshy007]

makes you wonder if they used a stock install of vista, or the upcoming vista sp1 etc. 'here, it's not a pile of crap'
(with each driver being run having been fully audited by microsoft, and everything tested beforehand to make sure it works)

A good test would have been to have them install the os themselves, on a box that could be randomly chosen from a large selection each with different hardware, and to see how well they fare with getting it all going.

Re:makes you wonder

[Ilgaz]

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

[cpotoso]

Apple's hardware is a mixed bag. The MacPro is wonderful (I have an 8 core machine), but the imac (alum. 20") is a piece of crap. The "superdrive" (made by MatSHITa, a well deserving name) claims to burn DVD's at 8X, but can barely scratch 3x (but apple just says "buy dvd+r from us and it will work at 8x, CRAP! they may even have put a screwed-up firmware in there). The screen is horrible, even though they advertise it is wonderful. Apple is a deceiving company, like many others, the problem is that if you like their OS (which is quite decent) then you are stuck with their inferior hardware.

Re:makes you wonder

[antek9]

The "superdrive" (made by MatSHITa, a well deserving name) claims to burn [...]

Sorry about your troubles, but by Matshita you don't mean the company Matsushita, by any chance? The same company that sells their products under the brand name Panasonic overseas, to be exact? I would advise googling the model number of that drive to find if it is really the drive that's at fault in your iMac, or if it is not rather the motherboard, SATA bus, or some other bottleneck that causes it to be slow.

Or maybe blaming a renowned maker because of anecdotal evidence is half the fun, in which case I'd like to state before the jury that out of all the hard drives I've ever owned (twelve, more or less), exactly three did fail and could not be recovered, and of those three drives, three (meaning, 100%) were manufactured by a company called Seagate. Personally, I won't ever buy anything labeled Seagate (or Maxtor, guilty by association) again, but do I run around claiming Seagate is The Evil? No wait, I guess I do, but then I got _three_ pieces of evidence. Or so it goes...

Only Vista?

[dword]

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.

Marketing Reboot

[dalmiroy2k]

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.

Re:Marketing Reboot

[TheRaven64]

I don't think Vista's requirements are a problem at all for people with at least a 2 year old pc.

I think you mean desktop PC. Since the majority of new sales are laptops (and a lot of these are low-spec, low-power, machines), and a large number of people didn't upgrade their desktops for well over two years (few non-geeks I know have upgraded machines bought after about 2000/2001 for any reason other than hardware failures, since they've been 'fast enough') the number of really Vista-capable machines is probably a lot smaller than you might expect.

Desperation?

[ISurfTooMuch]

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.

Re:Desperation?

[tknd]

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.

First off there are things that Vista does wrong, but there are also things that it does better. The problem they had was they are sitting on years of backwards compatibility and broken concepts that to change them would violate the "consistency" of the OS. This puts them in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.

For example, let's talk security and UAC. In the Windows XP world, some applications were written poorly where they assumed that they had full access to pretty much the entire system. That meant something as simple as writing a configuration file to the directory where the application was installed was acceptable. In Vista that changed, installed software should never write configuration files to the directory where it was installed, but instead write to the current user's "home" directory. So in this situation, they couldn't force stricter security without being annoying and alerting the user whenever an application was trying to do something that is perceived as bad (writing new files in the programs directory).

Now the problem with their current marketing strategy with the "Mojave Experiment" is that they are explicitly saying "this is still Vista" behind the scenes as if it is an attempt to "prove" that what is perceived as a bad product is actually a good product. That is a bad idea because you are fighting perception (right or wrong) so regardless of the test results, you still have to correct that image. The truth is that Vista as a brand or product has already taken the grunt of the ridicule, so if you simply gave it a new name and never disclosed to the public that the new product with a new more convincing marketing strategy was still 95% the same as Vista, you'd have a much better chance of gaining market acceptance because all of the prior criticisms will be wiped clean.

A good example of this is a story on of my teachers told me about. He had a friend that went to a foreign country and found jeans that were of comparable quality to jeans sold in the U.S. but for a fraction of the price. He figured he could sell them for $20 (which was half the price of other jeans) in the U.S. and make a ton of money. So he bought as many as he could and shipped them back to the U.S. He loaded a store with the jeans at $20 (remember other jeans are selling at $40) and waited for the money to roll in. But it never happened. What was happening was customers would walk into the store, see this new brand they've never seen before at half the price of the other products and think "there's something wrong with these jeans". So in the end, people were not buying his jeans even though he knew that they were of comparable quality. So after realizing this, he took all the jeans off the shelf, remove the labels and put a new brand on them. He then put them back into the store at $40 each (priced like everything else) and all of the jeans sold. Same exact product, but new marketing strategy and profits are doubled!

Another example is an example of a local supermarket (not one of the big chains). In this supermarket, they sold fish that was pre-packaged into the Styrofoam and plastic wrap packaging so when you bought the fish, you didn't have to have it packaged and you could just put it into your cart. At one focus group they got a complaint that "their fish was not fresh like the other fish markets". But the employee in charge of buying the fish said, "that's a lie, I get those fish from the same distributor every morning as all the other fish markets." So the owners sent a person to go look at how the other fish markets were selling their fish. And they found that the fish were not packaged, but instead displayed without packaging on ice and when the customer wanted to buy a fish, only then was the fish packaged. So in their own supermarket, the owners added a new fish section where they disp

How don't they know ?

[burni]

This is the question which bothers me when reading about the "mojave experiment", how can it be that those ppl. haven't seen anything of vista and so could not recognize it on sight ?

I know how Vista would look - as 90% of /.readers did - when it was a beta, a thanks to independent software distributors.

So what have they changed, that those "experienced users" haven't recognized it as vista, or were they drugged before or even bribed ?

Was it really Vista or was it Windows Server 2008, which seems to be the better Vista ?

I think of this as a usual MS market scam, but it reminds me to a similar kind of annoying advertisement IBM was persuing
for OS/2 Warp 3.0.
It was on german TV, don't know if it was somewhere else on TV, featuring a small headed blondi-like secretary who was just to dumb to understand how real multitasking would make her work easier, and how OS/2 would push her climax to a new orgasm*)

By the way if it wouldn't be possible to turn off all colourfullness on WindowsXP I wouldn't use it either and
stayed with Windows 2000, or I would have poisoned the search dog, burned the wizzard and clamped the paper clip.

*Warning this is a pleonasm.

Re:They have a point

[datapharmer]

Well I haven' complained yet, but let me chime in. I haven't installed it, I didn't need to. I used it on a brand new acer laptop where it was preinstalled by the manufacturer. The machine is a core 2 duo with 2 GB ram and and X3100 graphics which was the best available onboard chipset from Intel at the time of purchase.

Problems with Vista that you notice very quickly (but not in 10 minutes):

1. Windows Firewall, UAC, and Norton (preinstalled) fight constantly over control of the PC. If you go online for very long you will go nuts from messages asking you to turn on or off norton or windows firewall because one is better than the other and then more messages asking if the decision you just made is the decision you wanted to make. This repeats over and over no matter what you choose until you minimize the warning messages or go insane.

2. The power management doesn't warn you when the batteries are low and doesn't sleep the computer no matter what settings you choose. It is always fun to play "guess when we hibernate", especially since their handly little "we'll hide random tray icons" means you are less than informed about the remaining battery %.

3. The OS doesn't allow the computer to step-down the speed properly when doing simple things like word processing, so the fan goes nuts and the computer has actually gotten to dangerous heat levels and shutdown.

4. IE 7 gives abort retry fail messages in a loop every 3d time or so it is used. We finally figured out that if you hit abort about 17 times it will go away and will work for a couple web pages before crashing out. We used those couple webpages to download firefox which works until the machine gets too hot and shuts down.

5. Wireless doesn't work properly. It doesn't always detect networks even when they are in the same room and often won't connect to secure networks even if it detects them, or it will stop responding and the only thing that will get it to connect to ANY network after that is running the network repair 5 or 6 times which does god knows what saying no network problems found the first 5 times until the 6th time it says network repaired and working.

Note that none of these problems were experienced running ubuntu on a bootable cd or on XP after tracking down drivers, and all these problems were experience out of the box, and continued after installing Vista SP1.

I'm sorry, but if literally being unable to check email, visit a website, or type a document without a bunch of messages, warnings, errors, and failures doesn't equal a bad user experience, I don't know what does... perhaps their next operating system can poison my cereal too.

Re:sigh

[Datamonstar]

I used to be just like your boy there, until yesterday when I took my fist tech call on Vista and was treated to 15 mins of "initializing your desktop" right after setting up the software. This was on a brand new, right out of the box system that should have been as simple as plug it up, turn it on, change the date/time, make a password and start browsing. But no, it took 15 mins to "setup" even though everything was already installed and the desktop was drudgery to navigate with more than 3 windows open. Absolutely unacceptable that there's NOTHING the average user can do to change that and I really feel for the people who are stuck with such a bad product product because there's nothing else to really compete with it and they don't have the knowledge or means to simply install XP or Linux as an alternative.

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

[yelvington]

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.

Re:Hardware

[loraksus]

I'll put $20 down that their test rig wasn't running an antivirus, since those kinds of apps kill performance like nothing else on Vista.
Also bet you UAC was off.

In any case, MS claims this was is a "demo" which suspiciously sounds like "video" or at least a restrictive environment.

Speaking of controlled environments - the "ooh shiny" does make it seem much faster than it really is if you're not running a side by side comparison. People are more than willing to wait 1.25 seconds to open up "Computer" if 3/4 seconds is spent in animated windows, fades and icons filling in.

Honestly though, from a marketing standpoint, it's time to just give up marketing Vista and time to start praising the virtues of Windows 7.
Redmond should be happy with the money they are making bundling the OS with new hardware sales.
At this late stage, marketing money is just being pissed away. They sure as hell aren't going to convince anyone knowledgeable to "upgrade."

Also from a marketing standpoint, it would be nice to release some "Ultimate Extras" so the MS fans who dropped the extra $200 on ultimate don't feel like they got screwed. And I mean "now", not "3 months before the release of Windows 7 in a last minute attempt that will be seen as disingenuous and only serve to piss people off"
Get an damn intern to write a few screen savers or something.

Re:Hardware

[SharpFang]

Then DO run it at 512MB RAM. Just not the OS alone. Let them launch Photoshop, let them try to open a bigger document in Office 2008, or do any of dozens of tasks that are not a problem on a 512MB XP machine.

An operating system that leaves less than half the available resources to the actual applications is a serious mistake.

Operating system should be a piece of background noise behind the actual applications, a tool to switch between them arbitrate conflicts and manage resources. If there's no room for applications left, what good is the operating system for?

I hate Vista, I have tried it.

[Innomin8]

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.

Overall, i like Vista.

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

I generally like Vista. Its flawed though and i hope that Microsoft will fix the silly memory management which just gobbles of all of your ram and never releases it to applications (they say it does... but it does not)

Going back to XP... is a bit primitive feeling. Vista has some nice UI enhancements, but i would rather see Microsoft do more with it. Its anoying to always switch folders to detail list mode, and some just show the music details... this is very anoying.

Even if you switch a folder to show a detail list... It would be nice for Vista to auto adjust each information column to display the information properly. I know you can right click on it, and have it adjust... but you need to do this for every folder.

XP is too barebones, and Vista is too bloated.

But i do like vista... i dont love it... and often i hate it.... but i tend to like it.

The DRM shit has to go, and they need to focus on system performance and ui rather than worry about stupid shit like weather or not i can steel movies or music from their data pathways. Especially when its at the cost of performance. Any smart computer user would know that performance is very important. Microsoft needs to get that in their head. The OS is not an interface to giant corporations, it is my desktop.

I know MS says in order to get blu-ray on windows, they had to encrypt the video pathways, thus rendering millions of crt monitors, landfill material. I find this disgusting, especially from BILL GATES, who is supposedly a humanitarian with an interest in helping man and the environment. Well Bill, you just dumped a shitload of CRT's into the ocean.

Blu-ray would have come to windows no matter what. The entire world runs windows... i think Sony would have to live with that.

Rip the DRM shit out now. Its bad for the environment, the user, and the performance of your OS. When you're more concerned with protecting IP, than PC performance, you are no longer writing an OS in my opinion.

I did say i enjoyed vista right? hehe.. I do... its got to evolve into a lighter, leaner, faster, meaner os. MS needs to make a killer OS. Vista was not it, but perhaps a step towards it. We can only hope.

How could they NOT know..

[chrispycreeme]

How could anyone NOT know what Vista looks like (and acts) at this point? Why do I picture 99 out of 100 of the users in these videos sitting down at the machine and saying "This sure as hell looks like Vista" and then getting frustrated and leaving.

Re:Except...

[Shados]

Keep in mind that this is a machine from a major OEM that came preloaded with signed Vista drivers. I can only imagine what my experience would have been had I installed Vista on an older machine without the proper hardware and drivers.

It would have been a -lot- better, plain and simple. I had Vista installed on douzens and hundreds of computers (the last company I worked for used Vista across the board). Zero problems, zero crash, no problems, ever (all of them installed on our own or via images we made ourselves)

Then I buy 2 computers from Dell. The desktop crash. The control panel doesn't show any icons. I get random error popup messages all over (thats out of the box! did they even -test- their fucking image?), the machine is dog slow, even though it has 3 times better hardware than my work computers, etc.

Turns out many of the drivers were -not- Vista certified, and had -documented- issues with Vista (the documentation stating it shouldn't be installed on Vista dated from MONTHS before the drivers were installed), had a version of Nero installed with -known- Vista compatibility issues (it was -several- versions behind) which caused 80% of my crashes (uncompatible codecs), and some of the bloatware was also not Vista compatible in the installed version.

Updated all my drivers (Vista certified versions had been out for months, wtf Dell?), upgraded Nero, uninstalled the bloatware garbage.

Now everything was fine. Still, never had any issue on computers that I built myself, or the business machines we installed on our own, and they had old (often incompatible!!) hardware. Yet it worked better than these 2 stupid Dell machines with Vista pre-installed.

I did a quick survey with people around me who got OEM installed Vista, and helped them fix issues they had... the above seems to be the norm more than the exception, and HP is worse than Dell at it. I seriously can't beleive they even try and boot up their Vista machines... there's so many issues with their default installs, its mind boggling.

Re:Long wall of other people's writing for you.

[MightyMartian]

There's a key difference. Apple's strategy (for better or for worse) in selling Macs has been for over twenty years to sell new hardware. Microsoft's business plan has long been in a constant stream of cash from upgrades. I think there are probably flaws in Apple's Mac plan, but it's considerably different than how Microsoft functions. Vista, for Microsoft, represents a major failure. Microsoft isn't into developing and supporting mature operating systems, but into pushing new ones, even where users may not need them.

I think the quality of Vista is only part of the story. It's had similar problems in launching Windows 95, Windows ME and even XP. What Windows 95 and XP had (ME was a stopgate, and I don't think they were ever really serious about it) was reasonably large increases in computational power that could showcase some of the UI fireworks they'd stack into it, as well as hiding the underlying inefficiencies and compatibility hacks.

But by the time Vista comes around, there's significantly less push to upgrade hardware. People who bought computers in 2005 or 2006 simply aren't interested in the upgrades, or in some cases the replacing of computers. These are still pretty powerful computers that can play games, calculate large spreadsheets and play DVDs and Flash. How do you tell someone who just spent $1500 on a computer two years ago that they need to spend two or three hundred bucks on an upgrade?

The situation in the corporate world is even worse. XP has finally reached a point of stability and maturity that damned near every IT guy I've talked to is extremely resistant to introducing Vista, with all the problems known and unknown, even now, nearly two years after the corporate edition's launch. XP works, it's hardware requirements are modest, and existing workstations need little or no upgrading. Microsoft has been forced into a corner and has to sell downgrade rights so that even when equipment needs replacing, XP ends up on the machine.

It's too early to say there's a trend. It's clear even Microsoft is now in "wait until the next version" mode, and by that point, if for no other reason than the failure of five or six year old hardware, Windows 7 will probably do considerably better. In this case, Vista will very much be another Windows ME or DOS 4. But there is a window here of opportunity for corporate and open source competitors, if they can get their shit together and not blow it like IBM did with OS/2 in 1993-94. More announcements of hardware vendors making their product lines more open source friendly makes me think there's a fundamental shift in the industry underway. Microsoft's nods to certain sectors of the open source community makes me think that there may be a few forward-thinking individuals in Redmond who realize that the current may be changing.

Sounds like my experience...

[gillbates]

Except that I stopped after installing Ubuntu. Suddenly, my laptop with a "mere" 512MB of RAM is responsive again.

Oh, and I don't have to worry about viruses, either.