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:
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The focus group took place over three days in San Francisco and was conducted earlier this month.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
Mojave Experiment = Vista PR Stunt.
*insert grumping, ranting, and other curse words here*
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Yeah, it’s a PR stunt… and a bad one IMO. The people they picked… well, to be honest, look and sound like idiots. This doesn’t make me want to switch to Vista, it makes me want to claw out my eyes.
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I think its not going to make much difference because people haven’t used the actual product, they have just seen the demo and Vista usually looks cool in demos only, but lets hope for the best.
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Its about time they stood up for themselves. I use it and don’t understand what the problem is. I couldn’t care less about Vista, XP, Mac, Linux or anything else but I just happen to have Vista and I never get crashes or poor performance.
Admittedly it’s not as radical as MS want us to believe but it has a few nice tweaks and, at least for me, very few problems…
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The bottom line for me is Vista doesn’t offer me anything that makes me want to upgrade from XP. I don’t care about the new UI – I use the classic UI in XP and would do the same in Vista. I don’t want a sidebar or widgets, I don’t want Aero, and I don’t want additional DRM.
The “improved” security features are an annoyance to me, and should be to anyone with common since. Sure, they might help my parrents and grandparrents from doing something stupid. But for a real power user, these features just get turned off…
So after you disable all of this, what are you left with? A version of XP that still uses more resources, and still has compatibility issues with software and drivers. – Granted there are other people besides Microsoft that are to blame for compatibility problems… but for many, XP just works.
It was the something with NT4 and Windows Server. Why upgrade to the new version when what you have does absolutely everything you want/need.
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