Our comments and trackback policy You Link We Follow, You Comment We Promote

Microsoft has revealed its ‘Mojave Experiment’ results. Last week Microsoft showed the demo of the experiment to those users who complained about Windows Vista. After the demo was show, they were told that its ‘Windows Vista’ and 90% of the users responded positively by liking it. Now the results of the experiment are made public by the Microsoft.

Microsoft flew to San Francisco where 120 users took part in the experiment. According to Chris Flores of Windows Vista Blog, following are some of the facts of the  research:

• The focus group took place over three days in San Francisco and was conducted earlier this month.
• All participants were either Mac, Linux, or users of versions of Windows that came before Windows Vista. Respondents were chosen from the focus group organizer’s database, called at random, but then selected based on having a low perception of Vista (<5 rating on a scale of 1-10).
• The participants were given a demo by a trained retail salesperson – geared towards the experiences they seemed most interested in following a series of interviews. While the retail salesperson drove the demo, it was geared by the interests and direction of the participant.
• We did not use some geeked out or custom built PC. We used an HP Pavilion DV2500. It had 2GB of RAM and was running an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz. The OS was a 32 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate.
• Of the 120 respondents polled, on a scale of 1:10 where 10 was the highest rating, the average pre-rating for Windows Vista was 4.4. After they saw the demo, respondents rated Mojave an average of 8.5.

You can have a look at the video results of the Mojave Experiment here.

Some people have asked Microsoft if Mojave is the big marketing project they’re working on, but the answer was negative. According to the Vista blog it is just:

an experiment we conducted on the fly that yielded interesting results. We’re publishing the video today because we think you’ll also find it interesting.

This is an absolute strategy, otherwise results would never have become public. It would be very interesting to see if this experiment brings any changes because Vista looks good on demos only but when it comes to actually using it, its not that good.