The Mojave Experiment

And what exactly does this prove? It's just a publicity stunt from Microsoft.

So they took a bunch of people who'd never tried Vista, showed them something from Vista (we don't even know what they were showed, exactly, or if they got to use it themselves for more than 30 seconds)

It's about as enlightening as your average TV commercial.. Oooh, so if I buy *this* brand, they say my clothes will be washed much cleaner. Gosh, and they have people who tried it to say how impressed they were. That must make it true....


And how exactly is it supposed to convert those of us who have tried Vista and just weren't impressed?

I'm perfectly aware that a lot of people have heard that Vista eats children, but haven't actually tried it. I'm also aware that if you don't actually have to use it on a daily basis, Vista looks a hell of a lot prettier than your default XP installation.

And if you combine those two facts, taking people who've no experience of Vista, but have heard bad things, and show them how pretty it looks, they'll say "ooooh".

And this is news how, exactly? Wake me up when they're able to do the same with people who are actually dissatisfied with Vista. That is, people who have tried *using* it.

I don't hate Vista. I just think it gets in my way more often than XP does, so I prefer using XP.

If we take a look here, there are a couple of points I find interesting.
They show that most people rated Mojave higher than an OS they'd never tried.
They did not show if it was rated higher than XP, OSX or Linux. And "many would have rated it higher, but wanted more time to play with it themselves". Sooo... they were not given enough time to actually familiarize themselves with Vista. Just how much is their score worth then?

Ultimately though, why should we care? If people want to use Vista, good for them. And if some of us don't, is that a problem? I don't want to spend my day debating the merits of Vista vs. XP. They're just operating systems. I certainly don't see the point in discussing the publicity stunts Microsoft comes up with in order to get you to buy their products.

Woah, woah!!! No need to wet your pants with your emphatic rage! When did I say it proved anything?

I realize that there are plenty of people who don't hate Vista. I love Vista, myself. I suppose my sarcasm was far too poorly marked up. I also realize that it's a publicity stunt from Microsoft (my alt tag didn't seem to work...meh). However, there are plenty of people like those people out there, and I like to poke fun at them when I can.

Rage? I just don't see why you, I or anyone else should care.

And I really really don't understand why so many people are on some sort of crusade, where they just have to tell the world every time a new argument for (or in other cases, against) their OS surfaces.
Or, for that matter, the need to "poke fun" at those less enlightened fools.
Those ignorant people who just use their computer to *work* on, and don't actually give a damn what product name it says when it boots.

So they're misinformed about Vista? And? Should we care? Lots of people are misinformed about hundreds of products. Usually, no one cares.

Can't we just treat operating systems like ordinary products that you buy and use, and no one really gives a damn about?
Can't we let people use "the wrong" OS without having to correct them, enlighten them or poke fun at them?

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Original post by Spoonbender Rage? I just don't see why you, I or anyone else should care.

Because it's entertaining? And because we're sick of those mac commercials? [wink]

Mac whore Wil Shipley says that it's Bad Science, Bad Marketing. I agree.

That being said - I am not surprised that Microsoft has done this promotion. There are still a whole bunch of uninformed people running around like headless chickens screaming that Vista is horrific, when infact it's rather nice.

the fact is that there are loads of experienced computer users who upgraded to vista and then downgraded back to xp. That's a hassle; for so many people to have done that is a clear indication that Vista isn't as great as Microsoft wants to tell us it is. Just because they had some blind experiment where a Vista expert walked a novice user through some of Vista's surface features doesn't mean they're convincing the majority of us that their new operating system deserves more of our money. Did anyone bring software to try and install during this experiment, like an older video game? Did anyone try to develop on it? Did the demonstrate what a system hog it can be, especially with aero?

I have a desktop pc with XP and a laptop with Vista. I like them both, and I actually think Vista is a little better. Still, XP is tried, tested, and stable enough for my liking. I don't really need to upgrade my machine with XP.

Does anyone remember when Windows XP first came out? It was an abomination! It looked like Noddy's Toy Town with all it's primary colours and how dare the get rid of the classic interface? Outraged computer nerds just had to downgrade to Windows 2000 or back to '98 or whatever...

It is exactly the same thing that is happening with Vista. There is nothing new here, it's chewed meat.

My thoughts on operating systems. Let's say you just want to go to the shops to pick up the paper, you can use:

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Original post by Andrew Russell [...]There are still a whole bunch of uninformed people running around like headless chickens screaming that Vista is horrific, when infact it's rather nice.

Vista has a ton of really nice features running in the background (kernel, services, shell internals, etc) that I'd love to use. Unfortunately, the new features just aren't worth the GUI changes (and no, I don't mean Aero) or the price for me.

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Original post by Codejack Does anyone remember when Windows XP first came out? [...] It is exactly the same thing that is happening with Vista.[...]

It isn't exactly the same, because you can make Windows XP look and act like Windows 2000. Changing the theme in Windows Vista does not change the layout of anything back to the way it was in previous editions, and the GUI has been significantly redesigned for many core parts of windows. I don't mind GUI changes in general, but I do mind the kind of changes they've made in Vista (and have been making in assorted products since 2000) - they make things easier and more convenient for average users (that have no idea what they're doing or what they want) at my expense. It makes plenty of business sense, but doesn't interest me. There needs to be a separate "Windows: Power User Edition" (with "Business" making more sense than the previously-used "Professional" label, since it is a version targeted at use by businesses).

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Original post by Spoonbender Rage? I just don't see why you, I or anyone else should care. Or, for that matter, the need to "poke fun" at those less enlightened fools. Those ignorant people who just use their computer to *work* on, and don't actually give a damn what product name it says when it boots.

Deep breaths, calm... :)

Those 'ignorant' people are the non-tech home users. They're not poking fun at them by saying 'Look, these people are stupid because they don't know what Vista looks like!'. In fact, if I asked most of the people I know that don't stay informed about things, yes they'd know about Vista, but they probably wouldn't notice it wasn't XP just based on things like the Start bar, desktop background, or some universal app like Quicken or Turbo Tax (those three items are probably 90% of what the home user sees, other 10% probably the internet but thats just a difference of browser). These are the people that need to buy new software typically because they use stuff like Windows 95 for 20 years because they don't know what to change to, and those are people this type of experiment is targetting in this PR stunt. Uninformed, not ignorant.

I don't see any reason to hate on this PR stunt, Microsoft is a company and needs PR just like any other company.

@MJP: Justin Long is a Mac, therefore they must be superior right? :p

I'm glad I didn't buy into the Vista is shitty hype. All I heard was that there was no compatibility, it blue screened a lot, and was slow.

So far my experience has been, everything works perfectly fine, except for Diablo 2 when UAC is off(but Vista warns you there's compatibility issues when you put the disc in and provides a page of instructions on how to turn UAC on to make it work), The only blue screens I've gotten were from bad RAM and my weird USB Bluetooth adapter when using an unsupported third party driver(then again I've never used an OS that doesn't crash, I've managed to crash every OS I've ever used), and benchmarks show it's roughly the same speed as XP for the games I play as long as I leave them in DX9 mode. The framerate does drop when using DX10 modes of games, but since Windows XP doesn't support DX10 at all, you can't really make a comparison there.

Then I found things like the new start menu, windows+tab, and the per application sound control I kind of ditched XP for good.

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Original post by Extrarius the new features just aren't worth the GUI changes

I am curious: what GUI changes, specifically, are you referring to?

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Original post by Extrarius There needs to be a separate "Windows: Power User Edition" (with "Business" making more sense than the previously-used "Professional" label, since it is a version targeted at use by businesses).

Please, don't give them ideas. There are already 4 too many versions of Vista on the market, including the joke known as Starter Edition.

I love pointing out to slashdotters who say that Vista is a complete and utter failure that Vista had more marketshare in 8 months than Linux achieved in over a decade.


They usually shut up at that point.


Having said that, I don't have any experience with Vista, but I want a 64-bit OS so I can use more than 3GB of RAM. I tried XP64 and that was a disaster, so I'm currently debating between Server 2008 (lack of DirectX support though) and Vista. Plus I'll get to play around with IIS7 on my own time, rather than trying to find excuses to use the Server 2008 box at work :-D

">As for the Mac commercials...

That's all I've got to say about that.

I thought this was pretty funny. I'm not sure how well it would work as marketing, but as someone who has seen that blanket reaction of "Vista is horrible" from people who've never used it, I got a chuckle out of this. Sure some people have issues (legitimate ones for that matter), but I also know myself and lots of others who use Vista on a daily basis (I use it for work and personal stuff so probably close to 10 hours a day 5 or 6 days a week, minimum) and never have issues. It's like any other OS upgrade. Some people have issues, some don't. Maybe I just use all the "right" software or maybe I'm just lucky.

In regards to the OS X ads (and Macs in general), I don't really know why people have such big issues with them. It's just a different OS and a different computer. If you don't like them, just don't use them and move on. Why focus so much anger and dislike on something instead of just moving on with life?

Vista is my favorite OS ever. What is this everyone hates Vista BS? Don't speak for everyone. Vista is the victim of a horrible smear campaign, and maybe some bad timing and marketing on MS's part, but it is a great OS.

There's too many versions of it. There should be one version for everyone, and you install what you need.

BTW, the Windows 2000 look is in Vista, if you want it. The OS is much more than a GUI update.

Clever idea, but what a stupid basis for a marketing campaign.

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From the Microsoft PR department Hey, everyone! Remember how Vista sucks? How everyone's always talking about how terrible it is, how much it sucks, and how it sucks and everyone hates it? Well, we set up an experiment with a bunch of Average Joes to see if it really SUCKS LIKE EVERYONE SAYS WINDOWS VISTA SUCKS. Check it out: These people don't think it totally sucks in every way imaginable! Actually they liked it. BUY NOW!

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Original post by Funkymunky the fact is that there are loads of experienced computer users who upgraded to vista and then downgraded back to xp. That's a hassle; for so many people to have done that is a clear indication that Vista isn't as great as Microsoft wants to tell us it is.

There are also loads of experianced computer users who upgraded to Vista and stayed there because they like it. About the only thing the downgrading people tells me is one or more of the following;
1) they didn't have the hardware to run it (new OS in needing new hardware shock!)
2) they had software issues for which there was no fix
3) they had driver issues (NV I'm looking at you)
4) they were taken out of their comfort zone and instead of trying to adjust to the new system spent all their time convincing themselves it was bad.

Aside from Creatives poor drivers in the first 6 months and NV's apprent inability to write drivers which don't crash even now Vista has been great for me, be it for game playing or developing.

I have to admit i've made the move to Vista myself. Today, along with a major memory upgrade (8 gigs of ddr2 1066), i'm moving to Vista 64 bit.
I'll tell my feelings about it later today (i hope).