Microsoft has a new online ad campaign in which they get the impressions from various people about Vista, then show them the great new “Mojave” OS (which is actually Vista), and they get them to talk up the features they like. Like any good infomercial the results are positive.
It’s a clever enough idea–since what most people know about Vista is just what they’ve heard–and not much more. They don’t know what they’re really missing.
Over the last year I’ve been careful in who I recommend Vista to. If I can see potential driver issues, I’ve been doubly careful. However, as time passes and people upgrade their hardware–which most often has adequate Vista drivers–my concerns pretty much vanish. I do think if you take away the driver issue and you have a relatively new notebook, Vista is the much preferred OS. With SP1 it’s simply better. It has better WIFI management, sleeps better, and with a couple config tweaks I think runs better. In terms of security, it’s an incremental step beyond XPs massive security leap with SP2. All in all Vista is in the right direction.
One thing I would add here, is that for technical folks I usually go over with them technical reasons for the “bad” things they hear about Vista. For instance, if some says display drivers are a problem, I explain to them how Vista is a step forward with its compositing engine and securiy changes. For the most part it’s not Vista that messed up its the driver writers. The way I usually present it is to go back to Windows 95 or when the transition happened from 16-bit to 32-bit Windows. It was during this company-saving effort that Windows graphics engine was left behind. Although there has been progress with the graphics layer, I don’t consider any of the changes as great as the one from Windows XP to Vista. And as engineers we all know what transitions mean in terms of getting everyone on the right boat. Point is, what Microsoft did with Vista was the right direction.
I give a similar argument with stability or compatibility of apps and describe how Vista even bends over backwards to try to be compatible with things such as XORing bits on the screen. Point is, Microsoft thought through how to mitigate display problems. Face it engineers employeed clever tricks over the years and some of those tricks have been replaced by techniques that actually have a design about them. Again, Vista is going in the right direction.
Shutdown/startup is another area that has many changes in Vista. These were needed because quite frankly the old ways would not guarantee proper shutdown of apps if you put a notebook to sleep/hibernate. This had to be fixed. Unfortunately, as engineers we all know that whenever you change something you tend to open yourself up for bugs and incompatiblity issues. Sure enough Vista got hit here. Maybe a bit better beta testing would have solved these problems before release. Possibly.
Lastly, people complain about how things have been changed or moved around. I know what they mean. Changes for changes sake can be frustrating. However, after using Vista for awhile, I think most changes are good ones. They do increase my productivity or reduce my management times. I will admit though that I’m still getting used to everything.
On the change side, I always show my engineering friends the integrated search and the better WIFI management. They always get it, even if they are a bit skeptical at first.
So anyway, for the mass market this “Mojave Experiment” might be fine, but for the technically minded people I know I like to give them the technical scoop. They appreciate it. A lot.
I would ask, was anyone shown the Tablet features in Vista? Or once again, were these “premium features” ignored. Oh, when or when, will Microsoft just admit that the Tablet features are mass-market features and make them available to everyone no matter what version of the OS they have.
PS. Notice that the mojaveexperiment.com site is Flash based. That means I couldn’t view it on the iPhone. Sorry guys, plain old HTML would have been fine for this or at least they could have had a plain site for mobile devices. Yeah, and this means going with Silverlight wouldn’t have worked too.
PSS. I think this focus group test really points out how important early adopter, blogger, and press voices are in successfully marketing a big product. I hope Microsoft doesn’t continue to over-react to its past mistakes with Vista here when they go into talking more about the next version of Windows.