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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."
Researchers have conducting 'taste tests' have found that recipients of grits in their pants preferred having cold grits poured down their pants rather than hot grits.
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.
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.. most people accept that Vista looks nicer, but looks are not everything to those who have to use their computer every day for work.
Would have been funny if they tried to do this when Vista was first released and one of the tests was 'delete a file' :p
which is totally what she said
You see all it requires is for users to be re-educated and they will love Vista. The same way that if only goverments could re-educate the voters they'd have nothing to gripe about.
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.
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.
75% of the whiners haven't ever installed it, and the other 25% tried to put it on a 6 year old budget "Dude I got Dell" computer the first month after it went public.
I don't even think there is even a dead horse anymore to beat. You guys are just masterbating now.
So... it just finished booting up?
Build a tool even an idiot can use and only an idiot will want to use it. -S.O.B.
Roseanne Roseannadanna: The violence in our cities must stop! Innocent people are traveling around on the Intertubes and finding themselves assaulted by violent corporations. Now they are using electrical gun-things to shock ordinary citizens when they innocently go to certain places.
Chevy Chase: Uh, Roseanne, that's a teaser site, not a taser site.
Roseanne Roseannadanna: Oh. Never mind.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
So, microsoft disguised vista as a good operating system... why don't they do that for EVERYONE?
I cant say this really suprised me. Seems like people foam at the mouth if you start talking about vista just because its from microsoft.
I work with a guy who really prides himself as being an tech god. We were looking at laptops because we both needed one, and of course all of them had vista. I was treated to him bitching how he couldnt find one without it. I asked why he didnt like it and he simply said it was because of all the problems people were having. I asked if it was the fluffy interface or the driver problems or even just the new-ish interface. He simply grunted it was because of all of it and said he never actulay tried it yet. I later learned he hasnt even had the chance to sit down and watch someone use it 0_o I think a huge chunk of people are like this, and it makes me die inside a little every time I hear it.
If your someone who isnt really a big geek I can understand the attitude. Of couse if your a IT person and your too lazy or retarded to simply find a fix for it and go on with your life, you should just grow up.
That being said, I use XP and I intend to as long as I can. If I have to change I will, and I wont be bitching the whole way down that road.
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.
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.
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 ?
/.readers did - when it was a beta, a thanks to independent software distributors.
I know how Vista would look - as 90% of
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.
Microsoft's attempts to pull their Edsel out of the mud reminds me of a line from an old Albert Brooks movie:
"Wouldn't it be great if desperation made us more attractive?"
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
No sig today...
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.
OK, poor call by Microsoft. Seems like a pretty pants way of recovering from a bad situation... but surely there is some logic to trying to avert Vista prejudice. I have not used Vista extensively... I switched to Linux in the Windows XP era and haven't looked back... but I have to admit that I have become afflicted by Vista prejudice promoted by the tech community. Have I properly trialled Vista before reaching my conclusion of it being the spawn of Hell? No. Have the majority of Vista-haters out there? I wonder. So yes, I can see why this would seem like a viable test, although they needed to keep it a closed one, and then work on the findings.
I have a lot of difficulty matching my Vista experience with the meme. People seem remarkably enthusiastic to dismiss the OS and complain about lack of compatibility and sluggishness in particular. My impression was going 64 bit bordered on masochism.
Having started out on SP1 with common, modern hardware, I have none of these apparently certain problems - indeed the reverse has held true. Vista boots noticeably faster and is much more snappy in use. All of my hardware had Vista drivers. I can't see why MS bothered with the 32bit version since 64 happily runs everything I've thrown at it. UAC was a nuisance for the first week but experienced users can revert to a proper account management and novices can get some of it's security from UAC.
I can see why businesses are sticking with XP. There isn't justification to risk any headaches. There's not enough value for home users with XP already on their machines. Advanced users may have specific reason to avoid it even on new machines.
It's fully justified to critisise MS for releasing a product that fails to push us substantially further forward than the 5 years+ since XP. But for Joe home user buying a new PC, I think the tech enthusiast community are doing them a disservice with our Vista vitriol. We encourage them to decide between Vista or XP, and to pick the weaker of the two. The choice should be Vista or Linux.
Ah, but industry rejection does not equal product failure. OSX seems pretty nice, with enough of a user-base to continue to exist, even if the industry rejects it.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This campaign has two problems:
1. It wrecks the illusion that Microsoft believes "Vista is the most successful Windows release ever". Have you seen them talk about Vista in public? They cite sales statistics and call it their most well received release ever. Why then do that campaign in the first place, and that late into the cycle?
2. Microsoft underestimated the power of technical users forming the opinion of their less technical friends, clients, family. The marketing of Vista (the "wow" begins now and so on) was targeted to the non-technical folks, while ignoring to address the concerns raised by the more technical people they communicate with on a daily basis. This campaign fails in that as well, so it'll have a very minimal effect on Vista's PR.
FWIW, built in webcams on most new notebooks work out of the box with no drivers (for which I'm thankful).
Andy
You can significantly reduce the amount of memory that Vista uses by tweaking the startup services. I stumbled across an excellent site that has a table of all the default Vista services and what they do, with a categorized breakdown of what you should and should not disable.
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.
These users never had to install software or drivers, never had to do any configuration, and were certainly never allowed to use any software that didn't work flawlessly with Vista (almost everything).
Vista's appeal is that it looks nice on a computer in a store. It's only when you actually start using it for day-to-day computing that it shows its true colors.
I had the displeasure of using the business edition of Vista for 6 months on a major OEM computer that came with it pre-installed. Even during the first week my "Windows stability index" graph hovered near 3 out of 10. From day one I couldn't install any printers, couldn't install or uninstall Windows components, and experienced hourly crashes in everything from Firefox to Photoshop from ordinary, everyday use. I disabled Aero and reverted to the Windows Classic theme after the novelty wore off (a few days after I started using the machine), but that didn't stop Aero's dwm.exe from continuing to devour memory and CPU time. Everything crashed, over and over and over again. Vista sets a new record for lowest average uptime, even for a Microsoft OS. It wasn't until I made the mistake of trying to install Microsoft Virtual PC on Microsoft Windows Vista that it deleted all the NTFS permissions on my entire system drive, breaking everything. I nuked the drive and installed XP, and have been happily using it for months.
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.
While playing with Vista for a few days (as the users in this blind test did) can be an enjoyable experience, actually using it for day-to-day computing is an utter nightmare.
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.
Firstly it's Microsoft selecting people, like they select people on their getthefacts site.
Secondly, asking people if they like an operating system... it's not like most people are going to be dicks and say "it sucks" to someone's face. If I was there I'd probably be encouraging and tell them I liked it too, doesn't mean I wouldn't switch from Ubuntu though.
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.
Very clever piece of PR on Microsoft's part. Nobody said ever said they weren't great at PR.
Speaking of blind taste tests, a funny thing happened a long time ago... my son was about six years old, we were at a mall where they were inviting people to "take the Pepsi challenge." My son was all excited, and so we lined up. They put two plastic cups in front of him. He tasted both. They asked which one he liked better.
"I like this one better," he said with a great air of seriousness, but, unfortunately for Pepsi, he went on solemnly, "because it's colder and it has more bubbles in it." The presenters tried to bull ahead ("You chose Pepsi!") but it was too late... everyone within earshot was cracking up.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
We tried selling them Vista... We tried threatening the VARs and manufacturers... We tried threatening XP users... Now we're gonna fool 'em into buying our operating system!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The fact it doesn't is indicative that it requires hardware features that weren't present in 2003-era video cards
All effects in Aero can be implemented using features present on cards several years old (vide Compiz). It just artificially requires DX10 compliance to boost sales of new GPUs and new systems, because you won't get all the bling when you install Vista on your old system. This was a wise move, because it boosts the OEM market where they are the strongest, but screws the users, because they are forced to upgrade.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
1. Compiz doesn't degrade gracefully, it either goes full hardware or doesn't work at all. Still, it works even on rather old hardware, including integrated Intel GPUs.
2. The features required by Aero were already present in old cards (vide point 1.), the decision to only support DX10 compliant cards and leave users of existing HW in the cold was predominantly a marketing one (to encourage purchases of new systems).
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.