The way to market Vista... Don't mention it's Vista!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-9998336-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Vista.

 

This is kind of a sad sociological experiment seeing how people blindly believe everything they hear without trying it themselves.

 

People just assume what they hear is true and that is not always the case. Most people that acctually buy a new computer with Vista installed do not have a problem with it at all. The most common complaint I hear about Vista is the lack of the Pinball game. Other than that it's stable as a rock, it is now as fast as XP (even in games), and I have never had a problem with a program not wanting to work with Vista. I even installed some really old games in Vista including Civilization II which was launched in 1996. I now run Vista on 3 out of 6 PCs in my house. The other 3 are acctually plenty powerful to run Vista, but they are still on XP simply because I don't want to pay to upgrade them to Vista.

 

I've used vista.
I hated it.
Just IMO, I know others havent had it.

 

I agree most people are ignorant about it they just hear that its buggy from someone who in reality dosent know anything about it and asume its bad in reality they didnt try it. The thing i think makes vista seem slow is OEM manufactures ( glares at hp ) that put so much bloatware on their computers that it slows it down. After you remove this bloatware it runs really good. I run vista on all my computers exept for 1 in my house. The worst computer iv even ran vista on had a 1.6ghz amd athlon 512mb of ram and a go 420 and honestly it runs fine i used it for 2 weeks while my laptop was in repair.

 

Mines a clean disk without bloatware.
I still hated it..lol

 

So, it's happened again!
The only difference is that the first time MS said it was Vista.
And then people tried it out.

 

Wow, I guess they are finally, really, trying to beat the negative perception around Vista! Just yesterday, I visited the Windows Vista portion of Microsoft's website to look for something, and they have a blurb in the corner stating how you can move to Vista with confidence, and they highlight many statistics about Vista's performance. They've even *gasp* admitted that Vista had a rocky start but it's better now with SP1- http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/discover/why-now.aspx and acknowledged how people loved Windows XP- http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-xp/future.aspx

IMO, this is something they should have done a looongg time ago, instead of letting Apple walk all over them with those ad's.

You know what would really be bold? If Microsoft showed those findings as an ad on TV (with permission of course), showcasing people's negative feelings first, then the "Mohave" walkthrough with each person's reaction during and after in their own words. This could be very powerful.

 

people simply hate change, hence why windows 90% market share. most of the time when users cry about vista they mention things that OTHER users have experienced. for every mistake vista makes the user makes 10 more. crybabies should switch to mac instead of hanging on to XP for their dear lives

 

Just as I hate religion.
But without good reason, you're just another one of the millions of other extremists out there ....

 

Well, first off, SF is not exactly a bastion of level-headed, rational, dispassionate thinkers, it's, well, it's SF.

Second, what sort of "users" were these? Just chumps off the street who had XP still installed on "a computer at home" and had something, anything, negative to say about _Vista? Did these folks have any relevant experience digging into the guts of their OS, or benchmarking its performance, or just "consumer users" who wouldn't know the difference between little-endian or big-endian, and who certainly wouldn't be able to catch the allusion to Swift?

Third, what sort of opportunity did these poor saps have to actually stress-test, benchmark, and root around in this "new" Mojave OS they were allowed to see? If they were only allowed to surf a few webpages, play a few games of minesweeper or solitaire, and (try to) send an email or two from outlook, then they really weren't given the opportunity to take the "new" OS out for a real shakedown cruise, and there's no way that they would have any opportunity to get any sense of how this "new" OS measured up to what they knew of XP (presuming they were something other than consumer users to begin with).

Basically, this is bogus marketing, unless the three issues above were resolved in favor of getting people who actually could tell the difference, given the chance, and in favor of having given those people the chance to stress-test and benchmark the OS they were presented with.


As the Car Talk guys would say, bo-o-o-o-o-gus.

 

Well to be fair, what percentage of the user base digs into the guts of an OS, performs in depth benchmarking, or really cares about an extra 2 FPS in some video game? The point was (I assume) to demonstrate to the mainstream that Vista simply isn't the pig that fanatical XP fanboys have painted it to be.

I was about to suggest that many XP disciples are merely too stubborn to give up an OS they've been using for 7 years, but then I remembered that they were still running Windows 98 until 2005...because XP was such a pig you know.

 

Why XP fans didnt like Vista is because it was a Huge jump.... MS released Vista LONG time after XP ..

during those years people had become hugely used to XP..now suddenly forcing the market to accept Vista is what caused discomfort.
IF vista was released just 3 yrs after XP then this wouldnt have happened.


When i got it on my laptop i didnt like it due to Laggyness, Crashes, bad performance.

But now i am fine with it...it has some features which are very useful.

 

fwiw, i didn't like vista.

about half of my issues with vista revolved around the GUI just being laggy. and i just remember that so often i would give an app the double click... then i'd wait, and just when i had almost given up hope and was about to go for the second double click, THEN the application would give me some sign of start up. (not some heavy application, talking about opening a "My Computer" explorer window)

and also the read write speeds were laughably bad. it took 5 times as long to install a game compared to xp. thats not exaggerating at all.

plus you consider the 15-30% performance decrease in games (for games that ran at all)

and it all came down to a lack of appreciation of vista.

now, granted, i don't doubt that vista has since fixed these issues, but thats why i didn't like vista when i tried it, and how can you blame someone for that?

and i'm still positive that its a memory and processor hog and i'm still betting that the file read write speed is still not that great.

BTW- if vista was released 3 years after xp, it would be 2004 and people would have 512MB of ram in their computers. i don't think that would have helped vista's cause.

for me, where I strictly use windows xp to install windows games (i don't even browse the internet on windows) there just isn't a point of upgrading to vista. why give up more ram and processing power to an OS whose features i am not going to use?

 

Yeah because all consumers do benchmarks and break it down. The point MS is making is that people don't actually try things before they make judgements. They just assume from what others have said and they believe the rumors.

 

Well, I think the point there is that prior to the XP --> Vista cycle, OS's underwent major upgrades every three years or so, and people were accustomed to the issues surrounding an OS change. The switch from XP to Vista is nothing compared to the switch from 3.1 to 95 for example.

The extra-extra-extra-long life of XP just meant that an entire generation of PC users came aboard who have never been through an OS upgrade, and indeed may have never used an OS other than XP at all. They don't recognize that the trivial issues surrounding the Vista release are no different that the issues that have surrounded every OS release, including the initial XP release. As I mentioned above, gamers at the time hated XP and stuck with Windows 98 because their games ran like crap (or not at all) on the then new OS. What goes around comes around.

 

I was 11 when I switched from 98 to XP....God I hated it. My 733mhz P3 with 128MB of SDRAM had difficulties. Damn, XP is such a memory hog!

 

Yeah. I remember buying XP off the shelf in the first few days after it was released. I installed it on a PIII 933 mhz, tricked out with 512 MB RAM. Funny to think that the very same OS I was using 7 years ago on a PIII 933 MHZ is still being installed fresh today on brand new core 2 duo systems with 3 or 4 GB RAM.

No wonder it's fast.

 

You must have lived in SF to have such an in depth knowledge of the people. I mean, it's not like TechTV was based in SF, right? They certainly weren't level headed, rational, dispassionate thinkers. Any MySpace certainly wouldn't put any offices in SF, since there wouldn't be any level-headed people available to work there. Come on now, it's one thing to attack this ad campaign (perhaps you had the same reactions to Apple's Real People campaign), but to attack a city's people?

I'm certain you read the article, so there shouldn't be any confusion about what the users saw.

They were shown the new OS. To me, this is an example of Vista naysayers who haven't had any real contact with Vista. Anyone who truly doesn't like Vista has had some experience with it.

 

I think Vista got a bad rap because it took away a lot while not offering much in return.

On my laptops, hibernate would not work or would break wifi, wifi rarely worked, battery life was a lot worse due to Aero etc., and in exchange I got nothing new except for random features like Sideshow that nobody uses, or the UAC that everyone turns off, or the sidebar that eats up screen real-estate

On my desktops, similar story.

Change for the sake of improvement is good but Vista just strikes me as change for the sake of change. The fact that they botched some very basic things like the ability to copy files (something operating systems including even Microsoft's had been doing reliably and gracefully for a few decades now) gave Vista a horrible black eye and I know many many people ranging from computer beginners to CIOs of Fortune 500 firms who personally don't see any serious value add in Vista but do see a lot of clunkiness.

My experience has improved over time. 32-bit on release was horrible. In comparison, 64-bit SP1 has proven to be excellent for me, definitely a top notch operating system. But if Vista taught me anything, it's that Microsoft needs to start over. The code base is too big, it's becoming monolithic. My friends at Microsoft all say the same thing: the monster is so old and so big, it's hard to add any meaningful feature content. (Witness Apple's feat of transplanting MacOS X to a mobile device, how quickly they did it and how polished it was out the gate--something Microsoft has been trying with CE and variants for a decade.)

Again I'm mostly enjoying 64-bit SP1 but frankly it hasn't made my life easier or made me more productive. It's XP 64-bit with a prettier face and wider driver support. I think that for many people, Vista is something that costs a lot of money, slows things down and in exchange makes the Start Menu colors look a little different from XP. Not exactly the formula one would follow to engender excitement from a user community.

Now whatever magic they worked in Server 2008, whatever staff they used to cook that one up and package it, THOSE PEOPLE are the ones who should have led the charge. Yeah, yeah, 100% same codebase, whatever--there's a huge difference in user experience from top to bottom. It's pretty clear Vista was designed to make Microsoft developers and managers excited even if it came at the expense of annoying users, whereas Server 08 was clearly designed with the end-user in mind. If that philosophy had played out as strongly with Vista and its initial launch, I think there would be fewer complaints.

 

My problem with it is simple. First, everything seems slower in Vista. Boot times are slower. Load times are slower. I have stopwatched it, but it just feels that way.

It also crashes with CIV 3 (the screen after the "you've won" box pops up) dies.

XP boots faster and runs smoother than Vista does. I don't see a reason to upgrade to Vista to lose performance. (I run a VERY stripped down version of XP)

 

New teaser site regarding Microsoft's experiment: http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

Nothing there yet though

 

i have switched every system we have that will run vista to it. i love it and will not look back myself..i repair computers for many local clients and i have switched many to vista and they all love it i have not one person who hated it or wanted to go back to xp afterwards

 

Hmm, I'm debating whether I really want to comment in this thread or not.

 

Yeah, me too. We're only on thread # 2347642149829 about the topic, even with this new (albeit interesting and funny) information.

 

too late you already did! lol.

 

I don't get it... ok ithe experiement had a code name, but wouldnt it kinda click in your brain "hang on this is like using Vista"?

 

And IMO I think when anyone tries something new for the very first time its always good and great!- I should know.... I was the same when I tried Vista for the very first time.
A few clicks here and there for half an hour or so aint going to tell you if its good or crap!

 

I believe the point being made is that many Vista naysayers have never even seen or used the OS.

 

Thanks for the link. Will check it out when Tuesday comes.

 

Thats the point. The vast majority of people hate Vista having never used it themselves. Someone told, someone else they know, who told them that this or that was crappy with Vista...and they all hung on to it like gospel truth (not religious, but the term fits)

Dont get me wrong i HATED Vista when it first came out, but i knew that as all microsoft OS's it would get better quickly. Vista has gained more headway since its release than XP ever did.

And the biggest reason i like vista... it forced hardware to expand (on the consumer level). As the memory and storage capacity of computers expands, i want my OS to expand with it. When we're using terabytes of RAM and exabytes of storage then i expect the OC to take up Terabytes of space and be able to use all of my RAM effectivly. I dont want all of that capability and still run something the size of windows 3.1

 

I used vista for over a year, but still hated it, even post SP1. Granted, SP1 improved it, but I feel it still has a long way to go.
Like many, I'm still holding on to my old games, some were just not compatible with vista but I'll never get rid of them. That coupled with flaky networking, frequent disconnects, and slow performance (things just taking a long time to load), I got fed up and switched and I couldn't be happier.
Microsoft even admits that vista was a disappointing release, but of course they'll still push it because it's their flagship OS and they don't want to lose any more money than they have to.
My personal opinion is, microsoft saw how quickly computer hardware advances, so this time around really took advantage of it (looking to the future). When XP first came out, I remember how slow it was compared to 98, and now, XP just flies, and I think it was a design decision to make Vista take full advantage of hardware today and in the future to give the user a better experience. I disagree that Vista made hardware expand, it will expand on it's own, just microsoft decided to take full advantage of it this time.
Either way, vista has been a major disappointment to many, and although in my opinion it's initial release was far better than XP's initial release, I'm not going to wait 1 or 2 or more years to finally have an OS that gives me a great "experience". What I use now "just works" and it's fast, even running on my old desktop, and I couldn't be happier.
It's pretty amazing to me, that even when I bought my laptop new last year (maxed out E1705), that vista ran like a dog. Sure, it was nice having a more "centralized" system, most of the software I needed already came out of the box (I was very happy about CompletePC Backup), but I just can't escape the fact, that my user "experience" was a disappointing one.

 

I've run Vista since day 1 release and post SP1. I'm still in the middle as I feel this is just an average OS that's so bloated, Dr. Atkins couldn't save it from obesity. They threw Turbo Cache, Readyboost and Superfetch at this bloated pig of an OS just to help it along. Oh and let's not forget a 3D card and 2-4GB of memory just so you could take advantage of Aero.

Microsoft needs to get back to it's roots and just develop a very lean core OS that's module driven. I know they can do it because they have for the Xbox 360. They need to stop with the mentality, "OK our last OS was 1.5GB lets make Vista 14GB and Windows 7 35GB." Btw that's just an exaggeration but probably closer to the truth knowing MS.

I want them to put out a small foot print OS that allows us to add what we want and not the one size fits all approach MS has been using for quite some time.

 

Isn't that what W7 is supposed to be or am I mistaken?

 

That's been my argument for months. If you hear something long enough and frequently enough, you tend to start blindly believing in it. Most of the people who still have disdain for the operating system have had no real experience with it. They're just going by what they "heard."

 

The rumor has been that MS was shifting away from the monolith style OS in favor of a modular subscription based OS. From the discussions, info and speculations i've read on this forum regarding Windows 7, it ain't looking too good.

 

Keep in mind some of that group may have tried or seen Vista at retail stores like Office Depot, Circuit City, etc. thereby drawing their own conclusions.

 

i seriously dont get it. I been using Vista a wek before it was release and hell, it was fast. Having said that, the first thing that comes into mind is that people use old hardware on modern software. Also, people are too lazy to to some digging and modify the OS to perform better. Thats the first thing i did. I went into the services and disabled all i could find useless. I also did a clean install and good defrag and couple of changes. Now Vista runs faster than XP desktop i have. I like Vista i dont really dont knoe why people complain. Noone is ever satisfied. oh well i like it and i am sticking to it.

 

It took them six years to go from XP to Vista, which was drastic but nowhere near as drastic as scrapping the current OS technologies. You don't go from Vista to "Minwin" in a couple of years.

 

In theory that sounds like a good idea; however, the only real beneficiaries (if there are any), are likely to be medium to large businesses that need a large number of networked systems. The consumer variants are likely to consist of only a small number of bundled suscription options, which will inevitably be designed around what the MS marketing folks think the average consumer user wants, meaning that those of us who aren't the typical consumer user will get stuck with a bunch of "options" we don't want, and won't be able to get many of the options we really do want.

In the meantime, the modular nature of such an OS is likely to result in a tremendous increase in the attack surface of the OS (i.e., each point at which a module could be plugged in would become a focal point of attacks intent on subverting the OS). The solution to that would probably end up being some sort of monolithic wrapper that would come in as many flavors as the available bundles I described above, and would in all probability further circumscribe the ability to customize or tinker with the OS beyond those surface features deemed acceptable for the average consumer user.

As you said, "it ain't looking too good."

 

I tried Vista at Costco and it seemed really strange and naggy. If it ain't broken (XP), don't "fix" it.

 

Most Accurate Thread Title Ever!!!!!!!!!

 

If you don't mind me asking, how so?

 

When I bought my new Sony SZ I left vista installed for 2 weeks to try and give it a good trial. Overall I was just not impressed, some things I liked some things I didnt.
Overall I thought vista was not bad, Vista booted up and shut down faster than XP does now after the same amount of tweaking(both clean installs with bloatware removal by Portable One), but some programs felt like they took longer to open under Vista than in XP and just less responsive.

The biggest problem I had that made me switch back to XP was that I could not sync my data between my WINDOWS MOBILE phone and VISTA. That is unacceptable for two microsoft devices not to be able to sync. I was using the latest WMDC available, and to my knowledge there is still not a fix to this. Active Sync worked under XP and has worked 100% since switching back.
As much as I dislike the iPhone (another rant), at least apple got the sync process right on the first try.

 

I have to agree: infatuation is good but what then when you have to commit to only having it for the next how many years?

I have to agree with most of this as well. I have been using Vista - post service pack 1 and in all honesty, the newness wore off and the features that are on it , albeit very good at that, did not impress me though. i believe that when Windows 7 comes out, Vista will have become good enough that people like it and then will be forced to windows 7.

as was quoted earlier" If it isn't broken(xp) dont fix it"

I do agree that the extra long cycle for the switch between xp and Vista (7yrs) was a hinderance and a negative point to Vista. I can understand this.
When a new OS comes out, I am usually one of the last ones to get on the bandwagon because my folks always said to wait untill they get the kinks out of it. Makes sense in most cases. Also as was stated before, the tradeoff of what people gave up with Xp for what was in Vista, was pretty mediocre. Although it took 7 years to get it working to a point that most people "tolerate", the large part of the consumer base did come under windows with the XP release. Maybe what MS should consider is that the consumer base is changing their needs in an OS. They want stabillity, reliability, and something that is not just going to be last weeks newspaper. People got used to the Idea of one OS and being that it was around for 7 years, Time makes people less likely to change. Just my opinion but what the heck.

 

That's odd, I have an Inspiron E1705 as well and RTM Vista in early 2007 ran just fine on it. I ran Vista x64 on it for the better part of a year without many complaints. In fact I briefly switched back to XP64 (due to my increased use of virtualization demanding more RAM and hard disk) and I genuinely *missed* Vista. I now run it on my new laptop and desktop and it's smooth as silk.

My E1705 also ran Server 2008, which survived a rather brutal certification bootcamp where I tapped out 2GB of RAM practically all day every day. Then again, I was the only person in the class that could do the Hyper-V exercises using a real install with a real Hyper-V setup. 99% RAM usage and it absolutely NEVER hiccuped in the least. I even used Aero. 8)

----

Back on topic, MS has updated their Mojave website:

http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

There's now a bunch of little clips showing people at the edge of Silicon Valley who never saw this 18 month old operating system. I'm not even sure how that happens, Vista is running on every PC sold at every computer store around.

 

It would amaze you the amount of people I know who haven't even touched Vista with a 10 foot pole.... I actually liked their experiment, it proves nothing, but just goes to show you can't just listen to other people's rumors and talk. Talk means nothing.

Anyway, I really am beginning to think most people who were having problem in the beginning and switched just had the wrong set-ups. I mean, unless I'm freaking awesome and lucky, I've never had a single thing go drastically wrong for me with Vista. Even when I dual boot Ubuntu, I still use Vista more. Not to it couldn't be better, but I'll take it as is.

Also, Dave when you try out Vista on a display computer at Costco...that's really no fair. People probably install a bunch of crap on there, and generally screw things up. That's my experience with display computers at BestBuy...they just don't Demo them correctly.

 

Great post!

I have been using Vista since September of last year, and I love it!

 

quoted-for-truth, a very well though out Sociological post!

 

I am dual-booting right now and find that I hardly ever log into XP anymore. It was great in its day and I owe a lot of my productivity to Windows XP. I have successfully undertaken and completed many critical tasks and projects with that operating system. However, its time is up now. I have retired its jersey in the HOF. Vista has been good to me thus far and I really don't want to go back.