Microsoft's Faux OS Video Goes Live

We earlier wrote that Microsoft's fake OS, Mojave, had birthed its own website.  The idea, a sort of blind taste test among Vista critics, was surprisingly successful with an overwhelming number of respondents liking the OS.  The website was, starting today, designed to show videos of the respondents, and indeed that part of the site has launched.

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.


Unfortunately we cannot embed any of the videos; the site is not designed that way.  When you first go to the site, it plays an "Overview" video; after that you can pick and choose particular respondents whose reactions you might want to see.

A few reactions:

• It's totally different that I heard it would be like.
• It represents a lot of things that you could only dream of a few years back.
• I'm getting it.
  

and on and on.  Some choice stats:

• 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.

Still, we'd like to add UAC and driver compatibility issues to the demo, and see how many users run screaming.  Interestingly, Microsoft said

Finally, some people have asked if Mojave is the big marketing project we're working on - it's not. 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.

So what's to come?