18 August 2008
Microsoft recently made a trip 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.
At the time Microsoft wasn't sure how they were going to use the footage, a few days later they decided to use it in an online campaign which you can access at The "Mojave Experiment" web site.
The comments that the people in the experiment make about Vista are telling: When asked why they hadn't upgraded to Vista yet, comments range from "Just the bad thing I heard about it" to "Just the negative things I heard about it, I never tried it myself". Users were also asked to rate Vista on a scale from 1 to 10. The average rating people gave Vista was 4.4.
What it clearly shows is that so many people that have negative comments about Vista have never actually tried using the program themselves. So from where did they get these impressions that Vista was 'bad'? It is probably a combination of factors. There where the (so called) tech pundits who bashed Vista incessantly. Then there was Apple with its often questionable anti-Vista advertising. Microsoft should also take some of the blame; it stayed silent on these issues for far too long, exacerbating the problem.
After the users had been shown "Mohave" and walked through some (Windows Vista) features like backup and restore, parental controls, recording TV, and making DVD movies, their comments changed dramatically. "Wow!". "That's great." "It's awesome." "Really cool." "It's impressive." "The speed is incredible." "I need an upgrade and that looks like everything I need." The average rating after the hands-on demonstration was 8.5. "Many would have rated it higher, but they wanted more time to play with it themselves," Microsoft notes.
The best part of this experiment, of course, is when the participants were told that they were really using Vista. "Really?" one man asks, incredulously. Mouths literally drop. "I had no idea that you could do all this with Windows Vista." "Son of a gun," one man says. "You got me."
I have been using Windows Vista myself from the early beta days, and while there were still some problems when Microsoft first shipped Windows Vista, for me they were no different than the problems experienced in the early days of Windows XP. It may just be that we have come to expect better quality software the first time around, and Microsoft would do good to remember that the next time it ships a major Windows version. But certainly after the release of Service Pack 1 Vista is on operating system that needs your consideration.
SME Solutions recommends Windows Vista Business as your business OS solution. We provide all the support, software and licensing on Microsoft products.