All yesterday I saw murmurings about this new "Mojave" OS that Microsoft was announcing or something along those lines. I have to say, I kind of skimmed over the headlines and skipped reading the articles; I wasn't really interested in a new OS out of Microsoft yet.
Then, for some reason, this retweet on Twitter got me curious. So I googled and found out that what MS did was to gather a focus group of people, and asked them about their opinions about Vista, and why they don't like it or won't use it. Then, they had the group test out their new upcoming operating system, "Mojave". The users came back pouring with 94 percent in favor of the new OS and the other 6% neutral or abstaining. Then it was revealed that Mojave was really just Vista. The users came back with expressions of shock. Microsoft published the videos from the "Mojave Experiment".
I'm not surprised that so many of the subjects had simply assumed bad things about Vista through what they heard around them versus actually trying it. In fact, the results are completely in line with what I would have expected had I heard that it was a non-biased party conducting the experiment and without hearing the results ahead of time. Tech Ex makes a good point though, in saying that the demo doesn't deal at all with configuration usability and other such issues, which could frustrate actual users who do switch to Vista.
Still, I'm impressed with the marketing scheme. I don't think it's a cheap trick, and in fact, I think it's smart. Apple commercials slam directly on PCs. Microsoft is just shooting down false impressions of their own OS, even though they were tricking people to do it.
It'll be interesting to see how this campaign affects their market sales.
20080730
The Mojave Experiment
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Enjoyed your post about the Mojave experiment.
Probably another reason people assumed bad things abut Vista was that really they dreaded another learning curve. A new cell phone, a new camera, a new computer -- everything such as this, you have to relearn what you thought you already knew. Humans resist that I think.
Thanks.
I actually think the learning curve issue is also why more people haven't converted to Macs yet. If people actually do switch over to Vista, I think the Mac learning curve will be easier to get over since many of Vista's new features were copied from OSX and Microsoft may just be helping Apple.
Post a Comment