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The Mojave joke
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"No! People like Vista! They just can't know that it's Vista!"
Everyone has seen those Mac commercials with Justin Long where he talks about Microsoft spending money on advertising rather than on fixing Vista's problems. People laugh, because they don't take it seriously.
They should.
Microsoft decided that because of Vista's at best lukewarm reception, it was going to hold a "blind taste-test" style study to see if people really hated Vista, or they just believed hype and had preconceptions. After conducting this study, run and designed by Microsoft, they concluded that users changed their initial views on Vista after a 10-minute demonstration. Initial ratings of Vista averaged around 4.1, while user ratings (so claims Microsoft) of Mojave ran as high as 8.0. Clearly, Vista is a good product, right?
No. It's not. Quoted from Wikipedia:
"In July 2008, according to a marketing manager working for HP Australia, Windows XP was still being chosen over Windows Vista for the majority of business computer sales. As all customers of OEM versions of Vista Business and Ultimate are eligible for a free downgrade to Windows XP Professional,[132] these Windows XP licenses are sold as Vista Business licenses, thus increasing Vista's sales figures.[133] Some computer manufacturers have chosen to ship Windows XP restore disks along with new computers with Vista Business and Ultimate editions pre-installed,[134] as well as new computers with XP instead of Vista."
The Mojave experiment suffers from a fatal flaw: it shows you fun features of Vista, but doesn't make you use it. If you don't have Vista already, you can't even view the experiment properly! As many people know, simply getting it installed can be an incredible pain. Supposedly Vista Service Pack 1 fixed the problem where you had to install the OS twice just to get it to work, but it turns out they haven't really solved it completely yet. What a surprise.
Have you watched the Mjoave experiment? They show users things like Windows Media player playing TV shows and acting like a DVR. They also show some fun new menu tools, navigation aids, and shiny interface widgets.
Newsflash: THAT IS NOT WINDOWS VISTA. Those are programs that Vista carries. Windows Vista is the core OS that still suffers from bugs, crashes, and that damn annoying UAC control. Remember that thing that pops up every time you have to fart, asking "This user wants to pass gas. Allow this action: one time only, always, never?" That's the UAC. It was so annoying that Service Pack 1 had to address it directly by forcing it to stop popping up so often. It still pops up, but apparently it lets you fart now.
When it comes right down to it, people still don't want to use Vista. Take a look for yourselves.
I'm not a Mac fanboy, or a Linux-crazed hippie on a rant. I'm a traditional Microsoft user who refuses to use anything but XP because Vista has succeeded in cheesing me off so badly that I have lost my taste for Jarlsberg. You cannot pretend that one badly run ad campaign makes your product great. If you don't install Silverlight, a flash-style program to help play the videos, you get little popups of "facts" that Microsoft gives you. Example: "Fact: Since Release to Market, the total number of devices and components supported on Windows Vista has more than doubled." Doubled from what? Will Microsoft even tell you that? Doubled from 10, or 20? Who even knows?
College students know enough that if you want to conduct a proper experimental trial, there are rules you follow. For example, if you want a consumer to rate a product, you have to let them actually try the product. If you were to tell someone that a knife sharpener was fantastic, user-friendly, and simple, then do the process yourself, of course the consumer would believe you. Try shipping the sharpener with a stack of knives your company makes, and see how that one goes in comparison.
You can see the problem here. People have problems with things as simple as a metal file. How do you think people do with something like Vista?
This was written by ZDNet's Adrian Hughes:
"(The Mojave Experiment is like “The Pepsi Challenge” but where participants have to judge which is the best drink based on seeing someone else take a sip)."
The study claims that over 140 members took part, yet the only videos they post on the web page is of the same 36 people discussing different points. If you glance quickly at the site, yes, it's convincing. If you realize you're watching the same fraction of test subjects, you begin to get suspicious. Turns out that users never actually had to install Vista, install software, or run a diagnostic. They just sat and watched someone click on fancy widgets for 10 minutes. "Wow. That widget you're incredibly familiar with is neat!"
Do you actually see someone forced to try to figure this out on their own? If you need an entire campaign to show people that an integral selling point of Windows Media Player is neat, how does that make it better?! You should not need to tell someone how to use a product that claims to be user-friendly. If Vista wasn't bass-ackwards to begin with, the Mojave experiment would not have been necessary. Instead, it's just useless.
Don't take my word for it. Spend over $100.00 for a copy of Vista. Install it for yourself. Read the EULA that limits you to only having one copy of this expensive crap on one running computer at a time. This is a real challenge for those of you who are on the fence about why to use Vista: try it. Let me know if you really think it's fantastic and great. I want casual PC users who don't have Vista already to give it a shot and let me know how it goes. If the average consumer really likes it on the first go-round, I'll change my mind.
For those of you readers who have been using it since Day 1 and think it's fantastic, this article isn't for you. It's for honest, hard-working, everyday people who don't know much about PC's. Why? Because when it comes right down to it, that's who you have to sell to. It shouldn't take someone with a degree in computer science to use Vista. Windows should not require strong technical knowledge to navigate or understand - it should help a user do those things, not block them.
