Digital Home Thoughts: The Windows Mojave Experiment Results Are In

"Last week we showed a video of the Mojave Experiment to a small group of folks here on campus. Today we are excited to share the results with the public. For those new to the Mojave Experiment, it's a focus group effort we initiated a few weeks ago. We interviewed and polled 120 participants in San Francisco, in hopes of better understanding everyday users' perceptions of Windows Vista and seeing whether there really is a gap between perception and reality. We wanted to see how people reacted to Windows Vista when they were not aware they were seeing Windows Vista. We recorded our discussions, and today you can see them for yourself."

The results are in, and they're pretty interesting. Each one of those icons above is a different video, and I've watched the majority of them. My biggest complaint? The audio level is really, really low on many of the videos - I'm having to crank up my speakers to make up what's being said. There are a lot of rumours floating around the Web - it's amazing to me what kinds of ridiculous things that people will believe, such as these people all being actors and this being an elaborate hoax. Time to replace the tin-foil hat with something stronger, like Xanax. These people aren't actors, and the results are legitimate and believable. The general public is ignorant about Windows Vista - that much seems obvious. The people involved in this experiment? 84% of them were Windows XP users, 22% were Apple OS users, 14% were other Windows users (pre-XP...God help them!), and 1% were Linux users.

A 10 minute demo of the cool features of an operating system isn't a fair way to judge the overall success or failure of an operating system, but these videos certainly demonstrate that purely on a features basis, people like what Vista has to offer - and that goes against much of the commonly held "wisdom" that Vista has nothing to offer in terms of feature, that it's just Aero eye-candy and nothing more. Day to day use, program compatibility, installation on custom (white box) hardware - all of these things weigh into the perception of how good an operating system really is.

I'm certainly not saying that Windows Vista is perfect, but the average rating of 8.5 out of 10 seems to be reasonable. I'd probably give Windows Vista an 8 myself, and that's after using it full time since it's release some 18 months ago. What would you rate Vista? Only post a number if you've actually used it for more than 30 days straight.