View Video Footage of Microsoft’s “Mojave Experiment”

Last week we told you about how Microsoft set-out to find people who didn’t think very highly of Vista. They interviewed them on video to ask them about their impressions of Vista, and then showed them a “new” operating system called Mojave. Following the demo of Mojave and after participants of the focus group rated this new operating system (most were impressed), they were informed that Mojave was actually Windows Vista. Until today, Microsoft hadn’t released any of the video footage, but now they have and they’ve set-up a new website where people can go to view the videos and get information on the experiment.

The website is found at http://www.mojaveexperiement.com and there you’ll find videos of some of the participants talking about “Mojave” and then their reactions when they found out it was actually Vista. If they would allow people to embed these videos, this could have turned into an excellent viral marketing campaign. The first video in-particular, the one that starts playing when you visit the site, would be great to have spread all over the Internet.

For this experiment, they used a new HP Pavilion DV2500, and it had pretty typical specs that wouldn’t be considered top-of-the-line:

• 2GB of RAM
• Running Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @2.20GHz
• 32 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate

84% of those involved in the experiment were XP users while 22% were using an Apple operating system. A rather small 1% were Linux users while 14% were using a version of Windows that came out prior to Windows XP. When these users were initially asked to rate Vista, they gave it an average rating of 4.4. on a scale of 1:10 (10 is the highest). Once they saw the demo and responded to Mojave, they gave Vista an average rating of 8.5. Ultimately, 89% of users “expressed satisfaction” with it. What a difference a demo makes, huh?

There were about 11% of the people who obviously didn’t express satisfaction if 89% were satisfied, but Microsoft didn’t include any information as to why those individuals weren’t satisfied. The bottom line from this experiment seems to be that people do have negative perceptions about Vista and Microsoft needs to take the time to clear them up. Those negative views can be changed by giving consumers the opportunity to see all that Vista offers first-hand. We do have to keep in mind that these individuals didn’t get to actually USE Vista, they were just viewing a demo, so that tells us that perhaps Microsoft also needs to spend some time making sure Vista owners are educated on all of the features the operating system offers, and that they know how to use them.

Source: Windows Vista Blog