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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.