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Microsoft officially unveiled their Mojave Experiment website today. The goal of this website, at least as far as I can tell, is to dispel the negative public opinion about Windows Vista and show people that Vista is awesome even though the general public at large are giving it a bad reputation. So they gathered a bunch of people who had never used Vista before and had only heard bad things about it and showed them a demo of "Mojave", Microsoft's next new OS. The trick was that Mojave really was Vista.
I can't decide whether this whole thing feels more like the old, "We've secretly replaced Bob's regular coffee with Folger's!" commercials or like the Pepsi challenge commercials. I strongly recommend you go watch the videos... not for their informative quality mind you, but for pure...comedy...goodness.
To summarize the viewpoints you see on the website, this is basically what you get: (note that there are MANY duplicate videos on the wall, so it doesn't take very long to trim everything down to this list):
First, let me clear one thing up: There is about as much chance of my mom having a smooth, fun time using Vista as there is of me winning the "world's fluffiest head of hair" competition (hint: I'm balding...). The other stuff is all fluff - none of it is really about carrying out your day to day tasks without aggravation or frustration. The other thing I noticed is that all of these features are typically the ones that you hear Mac people rattle off when asked why Macs are better than Windows PCs.. Coincidence? Considering Microsoft recently hired an advertising company to refute the Mac vs. PC ads... highly unlikely.
So, basically they showed them Media Center (which isn't really part of the OS, it's a bundled app like the iLife suite on the Mac), how to quickly find the Calculator application using a text search, and the fact that you can burn DVDs (they only had 10 minutes, so they couldn't possibly have actually burned a real DVD).
There is absolutely no substance here whatsoever. The main problem is that the crowd of people they picked aren't the ones who have been complaining about Vista, they're just the ones who have been listening to the complaints. They didn't show these people anything that refutes any of the real gripes with Vista...they just dangled a dancing bear in front of them and everyone went, "Ooo looky a dancing bear!! I want one!"
Pfft. Nothing to see here. Move along now.
You're right, nothing to see here - this kind of stunt isn't for people
like us but you have to put it into perspective. It's just a marketing
stunt, no different albeit not as clever as PC vs MAC. It wouldn't work if
they asked people who had used and now hated Vista. I wonder though, if we
all ran Vista on Mac hardware, i.e. Good, premium hardware with robust
drivers - would we hate it so much?
Is this an experiment run by Microsoft? I liked the interface on that
website, however I would've thought they would use Silverlight to build the
interface rather than Adobe flash. Again assuming the Mojave Experiment was
run by Microsoft themselves.
Yes, Craig, we would hate it as much -- I run Vista on a MacBook Pro
(2.33ghz Core 2 Duo, 2gb ram). So why do I hate Vista? Because I hate
having to make a phone call to reactivate my operating system because it's
decided for some unknowable reason that my operating system is not genuine.
