Interesting Ad Campaign for Microsoft

August 7th, 2008 · No Comments

I just started seeing more of these ads lately so I think they are ramping it up some, but Microsoft is doing a fairly interesting ad campaign built around something they call the Mojave Experiment.

If you go to the website you can watch videos of people that they did “user focus testing with”. The people thought they were seeing the next version of Windows code-named “Mojave”. They were asked about their opinions / pre-conceptions about Windows Vista and why they hadn’t upgraded yet and then asked to score it. They were then shown Mojave’s features and after that were told that Mojave is really just Vista. They were then asked to score Vista based on what they actually saw and it got much, much higher marks than the pre-conceptions.

This whole idea has made me re-think some how bad initial impressions can perpetuate into a general pre-conception about a product and its realiability, stability, or perceived feature set. I think the Mojave Experiment is actually the best possible ad campaign that Microsoft can be doing for Vista because they can admit that there were some issues in the past but that most of those issues have since been resolved. My biggest fear or mis-conception at this point is that many of the video games I want to play won’t run as well on Vista. It is also a fact that Vista eats more memory footprint than Windows XP does which I also don’t like. I’m hoping that for the follow-up to Vista they focus on making the OS as efficient and fast as possible, even if you have to get rid of a few whiz-bang graphical features. I also want to see some more work done on game application compatibility. I may upgrade to Vista when I build my new machine later this fall, but it helps that I can get it extremely cheaply through the Campus Agreement our University has. I think it only costs me $10 to get a DVD of Vista Business edition (similar in features to Vista Premium).

If I do end up upgrading i’ll be sure to share my experience. Also, I might end up going dual-boot with Vista and XP so that I can do software testing on both platforms for my software development work.