Well I was pointed out this by Mauricio Freitas of Geekzone and when it finally went live this morning I sat down and watched a few of the videos of the Mojave Experiement. If you are familar with the Folger’s challenge, this is very similar.

Chris Flores also posted up a post about it here on the Windows Vista Blog and said this:

"Last week we showed a video of the Mojave Experiment to a small group of folks here on campus. Today we are excited to share the results with the public.
For those new to the Mojave Experiment, it’s a focus group effort we initiated a few weeks ago. We interviewed and polled 120 participants in San Francisco, in hopes of better understanding everyday users’ perceptions of Windows Vista and seeing whether there really is a gap between perception and reality. We wanted to see how people reacted to Windows Vista when they were not aware they were seeing Windows Vista. We recorded our discussions, and today you can see them for yourself.

Some other facts about the research:

The focus group took place over three days in San Francisco and was conducted earlier this month.
All participants were either Mac, Linux, or users of versions of Windows that came before Windows Vista. Respondents were chosen from the focus group organizer’s database, called at random, but then selected based on having a low perception of Vista (<5 rating on a scale of 1-10).
The participants were given a demo by a trained retail salesperson - geared towards the experiences they seemed most interested in following a series of interviews. While the retail salesperson drove the demo, it was geared by the interests and direction of the participant.
We did not use some geeked out or custom built PC. We used an HP Pavilion DV2500. It had 2GB of RAM and was running an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz. The OS was a 32 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate.
Of the 120 respondents polled, on a scale of 1:10 where 10 was the highest rating, the average pre-rating for Windows Vista was 4.4. After they saw the demo, respondents rated Mojave an average of 8.5.
Finally, some people have asked if Mojave is the big marketing project we’re working on - it’s not

(That was me). The Mojave Experiment is just that: an experiment we conducted on the fly that yielded interesting results. We’re publishing the video today because we think you’ll also find it interesting."

It just goes to show you that word of mouth is still the most powerful form of advertising. None of these people even used Vista and they had negative things to say about it from articles written by the press, IT workers trying to get legacy applications written for XP (drivers and version checking create install problems), people trying to install Vista on old hardware (heck its almost cheaper now to get a new laptop with Vista than upgrade the hardware and purchase the OS seperately and deal with finding the drivers hoping it will work) and ads by Apple, come now, Isn’t a Mac a Personal Computer?. As a Featured Community member we have been banging the drum for Microsoft to wake up and do something and this looks to be a good start.

The thing that I don’t like is that there are only 55 of the 120 videos available(where 6 of them combine some of the other videos in a mashup) and some of the remaining 49 are from the same people, so who knows what editing was done, but I only counted about 35 different people. However I still think the Mojave Experiment does a good job showing that the public does have preconceptions of Vista before using it. What they should do is a follow up of the same people actually using a copy of Vista for a month and then video their responses for a true benchmark.

I am just hoping that the new $300 Million ad campaign gets them alot more than the $300 million they blew through on the launch that nobody saw. Microsoft has been criticized by everyone that they stink at marketing, come on $300 million dollars and no much of a buzz and no buzz during the year of Vista? For that much money you could pay a few groups of people to give demos across the country to Big Box stores, people’s houses, schools, work places, public areas, and large events. How cool would it be to see a tractor trailer/RV or even a Ecnoline Van with demos of Windows Vista in the parking lot tailgating and giving people hands on experience with it.

Hopefully the Mojave Experiment will help the people at Microsoft look beyond the Microsoft distortion bubble and into the real world as well as open the eyes of those that have them closed to Vista. (Note to MS use these videos and make a commercial out of them or at least link to it from the Windows Vista website.)

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