Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"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.

"After months of searching for ways to defend its oft-maligned Windows operating system, Microsoft may just have found its best weapon: Vista's skeptics. Spurred by an e-mail from someone deep in the marketing ranks, Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista. "Oh wow," said one user, eliciting exactly the exclamation that Microsoft had hoped to garner when it first released the operating system more than 18 months ago. Instead, the operating system got mixed reviews and criticisms for its lack of compatibility and other headaches."

This is nothing short of brilliant. It's often said that perception is reality, and the perception of Windows Vista amongst Joe Consumer tends to be fairly negative - though Joe Consumer would be hard pressed to explain why. I've heard people complain about Vista, but when pressed they admit they have little to no experience with Vista and they "just heard" it wasn't any good. Apple's attack ads are brutally effective at fostering this notion, and Microsoft was naïve to think that the slick, prime-time ads wouldn't have an impact on the general public. I don't pretend to be clever enough to know exactly how Microsoft should have responded, but they needed to do something and they didn't. I'm really looking forward to seeing the video footage from the Mojave experiment - if Microsoft is willing to spend the big bucks to advertise the results on prime-time TV, they could start to reap some significant rewards in terms of consumer perception.

It's also important to note that the demos were done on an HP Pavilion DV2000 notebook with 2 GB of RAM - as in, not a $4000 computer with high-end hardware. The dv2000 is a typical notebook that a consumer would purchase for under $1000 USD - showing that Windows Vista doesn't require massive hardware to run properly.

Are you one of those Windows Vista skeptics?