Microsoft just decided to pull off a ridiculous PR stunt with their “Mojave Experiment” this past week.

Apparently the word-of-mouth campaign that us techie people have initiated without any real organization has informed all of our non-geek friends of our innate dislike of Vista. Yeah, everyone knows that Vista is crappy, from the media, from us IT people, from actual users.

Microsoft decided that our friends needed a second opinion.

Their answer was the “Mojave Experiment” where they talked to 140 non-Vista users about their thoughts on Vista, and then had them “test-drive” the “newest” version of Windows, Windows Mojave. I’m guessing that Microsoft hacked their own system to replace all occurrences of “Vista” with “Mojave” for these purposes.

After watching the intro video, click on some of the other faces to get different *select* reactions. Also, be sure to check out the “facts” where Microsoft propagates what a truly awesome product Vista is, and tells us *some* of the stats and methods used in this experiment.

According to the site, they used an HP Pavillion DV2000, with 2GB of RAM…that is all the info given about the computer used. Let it be known that base model specs only come with 1GB of RAM, and use integrated graphics card, but I would bet that they upgraded to the Nvidia GeForce Go 7200 for this model, if not a higher end card. But you don’t get the kind of hardware you need to run Vista on a brand new computer. You know they probably maxed out the notebook as much as possible, installed the O/S without all the extra junk you get on a new computer these days, ensure that all the correct drivers were working before allowing the users to test spin it.

Tell me, do you really think they would let the test users experience awful tasks such as hooking up external devices to the computer for the first time, trying to configure a network, installing new software (thank you UAC!), or try to run multiple high performance programs (i.e. Firefox…or, ahem, I mean, IE7 and Adobe Photoshop and AIM, er, I mean, Windows Messenger, and Outlook, etc) all at the same time. See if there is no slow down there.

According to the site, which you can verify for yourself, most of the users were completely surprised that what they were being showed was actually Vista. I am guessing that like I said, these users were probably allowed to do simple tasks one at a time like play a card game of Spider Solitaire, check their Hotmail email, and type up a simple document, without any heavy duty testing that might happen in a real world environment.

But this guy, though the site calls him a skeptic, probably shows these true colors of this PR stunt.

Claim: “Windows Mojave really is Windows Vista.”

Response: “But why is it faster?”

He saw through these phonies. Obviously, these experimenters weren’t playing quite fair as I have stated.

UPDATE:
A couple of other thoughts I had: Why is the site created in Adobe Flash? Why not use their own Silverlight? I’ll tell you why. Because they want people to actually see the videos and people don’t want to have to download another plugin to view the website. I don’t have Silverlight.
Also, which version of Vista did they actually show users? I guarantee you it wasn’t Vista Basic, even though that is the prime operating system that comes on new computers now.