The Microsoft Mojave Experiment: what’s in a name?
Microsoft has received a lot of press coverage for their Windows Vista operating system, and unfortunately for them, almost none of it was positive. Vista may go down as the biggest software flop in history. Both businesses and individual consumers have rejected the system, and many who did upgrade have since switched back to their old software.
Talkibie has covered the problems that users have had with Vista, but most point to annoying alerts, difficult navigation, power usage, and incompatibility has major reasons they will not switch. Microsoft, however, seems to think the problem is one of misunderstanding. With a little rebranding, the company thinks they can show the average consumer that Vista has gotten an undeserved bad reputation.
A series of ads have been launched that highlight a project known as the Mojave Experiment. The videos show everyday people discussing their impressions of Vista and taking a survey to show what they know about the operating system. One man admits, “I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Vista.” The interviews serve to answer Microsoft’s underlying question: “What do people think of Windows Vista when they don’t know it’s Windows Vista?”
Using the codename “Windows Mojave,” Microsoft representatives allowed the participants to demo what they thought was the next big release from the software giant. The response is quite different from the initial interviews about Vista, and Microsoft urges consumers to “See for yourself. Decide for yourself.”
Microsoft’s Mojave Experiment website gives a few details about the study and how it was conducted. They polled 140 participants, and 94% of them rated the codenamed Mojave higher than they rated Vista. The hardware used to demo Vista is revealed as a “HP Pavilion DV 2000 with 2 GB RAM”, and 84% of the respondents were currently using Windows XP. None of the participants rated Mojave lower than they rated Vista.
These results show that word-of-mouth buzz about a product has a profound effect on how it is perceived by consumers. People who had never tried Vista vehemently stated that they wouldn’t touch the program, but when shown how it worked under a different name, they professed to like it a lot. The clever commercials for the Mojave Experiment may reverse some of the negative feelings that people have about Vista. It may convince some users to see for themselves how it would function for them.
On the other hand, the bad publicity surrounding Vista’s release has hugely impacted public perceptions of Microsoft, and many businesses who would normally upgrade are waiting for the next OS release. Will the Mojave Experiment change their minds? Perhaps for some. After all, Vista has been updated since its initial launch, and service packs have fixed some of the flaws that frustrated early users. For others, though, Vista’s perceived problems will not be overcome by a marketing campaign, no matter how scientific the study behind it was.
As the saying goes, “One bad apple can spoil the whole bushel.” Will Vista be that apple for Microsoft (no pun intended), or will Mojave save the day?
By Haley January Eckels
