Digital Home Thoughts: The Windows 'Mojave' Experiment

"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?