Comments on: Microsoft goes live with Mojave videos

Software giant is hoping that videos of Windows Vista skeptics reacting positively to Vista will help convince millions of other skeptics that the operating system just has a bad rap.

[craigber]

Microsoft has long taken the wrong direction with Vista advertising. Instead of hearing "drivers won't work like they used to in XP", explain how the new driver system helps make the system more stable and keeps out viruses. Everytime I've explained that to a Vista skeptic, they begin to change their mind about the OS. Also, once users get all the initial setup and installation done, UAC isn't a big deal.

[The_Decider]

Security is extremely important and the weak roadblocks they put up stops nothing for long.

UAC is a big deal because it is a roadblock that people get annoyed with and either ignore or shut off.

Even if Vista was as secure as OSX or Linux, it makes it harder to use for the average Joe and thus is worthless.

OSX and Linux can be reasonablty secure without getting in the way, why can MS do the same?

[AlbooMED]

@The-Decider

I'll take issue with your statement that somehow OSX and Linux are more secuer then Vista. Did you not see what happened at that contest, pown to own or something like that. Macbook Air down in 2 minutes. Vista 2 days later with a vulnerability from adobe.

[Penguinisto]

@AlbooMED: Yep, saw the contest. it included a guy who had a bug he'd been working on for months in advance, never disclosed it, and was allowed to execute it because he had local access to the machine.

Now compared to the real world (where Windows machines of all types --including Vista-- are becoming some script kiddie's personal property on a daily basis)?

Well that's different then, isn't it?

[Lerianis]

Part of the problem with the driver situation is that some of the things people are expecting to work with Vista are ANCIENT and the companies that made them have gone out of business. My one friend wanted a old USB hub to work on his computer, and I realized that the people who made it had been out of business for nearly 5 years, and no new drivers were being made.

[stevicus]

"My one friend wanted a old USB hub to work on his computer, and I realized that the people who made it had been out of business for nearly 5 years, and no new drivers were being made."

thing is... why should a USB hub even need a driver?

[sanenazok]

I agree with you Penguisto

But only up to a certain point. If you think there would be more productivity on the computer with XP than with Vista, then why not go all the way and say that there would be much, much more productivity with Windows 2000, or WfW. New features in Vista, including the look that I really like now, take up resources. It's just like I can get a lot more done with DSL than with a full blown distro.

[The_Decider]

Because as bad as XP is it is better and has more useful features that 2000. Using less system resources isn't the only measure of productivity. Besides a lot of programs don't run or run well on the older OS's.

[Penguinisto]

Therein lies the rub - What is it in Vista that justifies roughly 150-200% (or more in some aspects)? After all, XP had real advantages over Win2k (such as CD/DVD burning and native Zip-file compression/de-compression) that Vista does not have over XP. With every step (save for WinME), the new version had things that were almost necessary (and definitely perceivable) to the user, that the old version did not.

Vista has no such advantage. Its big feature list includes... pretty desktop eye-candy, a new version of DirectX, an annoying pop-up that gets in the way of your existing applications, the ability to bog down hard if you let it try to turn your geek stick into some sort of insta-RAM, and... what?

Seriously - what does Vista have that justifies the cost, hardware requirements, effort, and time? In the eyes of the consumer, and of the enterprise customer, the answer is "not enough".

That is what MSFT is up against, and they seem to be too drop-stupid to realize it (that or they know it, but can't do a thing about it). Instead, they focus on eye candy and a rigged demo on fairly high-end hardware.

Until they can convince people as to why they should upgrade, in tangible and real terms, they're bound to fail... and unlike the days of Windows ME? Apple + Linux are there to pick off the marketshare - at the high and low ends of the market, respectively... and XP continues to hold the middle.

That is what MSFT is up against.

[sjsobol]

Now, over 18 months after launch, Microsoft has had time to work out a lot of the bugs, and I finally feel that Vista is usable. It was utter crap at launch time; Vista Ultimate SP1 seems to actually work pretty well. Of course, to get the full experience, you still need a buttload of horsepower; my new Vista laptop has a 2.0 GHz dual-core Intel CPU and 4GB of RAM. And there are still minor issues here and there. But, in Microsoft's defense -- and I'm not even close to being a Microsoft fanboy -- it's a lot better than it used to be.

[The_Decider]

It is better than it used to be?

That could be true, but it doesn't mean it is good. Wouldn't you rather have a good chunk of RAM and processor cycles back so you can run applications(the reason OS's exist) better?

[Lerianis]

The_Decider, get off that crap about 'getting back cycles' and 'getting back memory'. As I have found by setting up two identical system, one with Vista HP and one with XP MCE, THEY BOTH USE THE SAME AMOUNT OF MEMORY AT IDLE WITH NO OTHER PROGRAMS INSTALLED! It also USES THE SAME AMOUNT OF CPU POWER AT IDLE FOR BOTH.
Period, done with, over..... they use the SAME AMOUNT OF MEMORY AND PROCESSING POWER AT IDLE.

It's time for you to stop putting out this UTTER BS, about Vista being 'slower' than XP and 'using more memory' than XP. It doesn't and never did.

[fooldog01]

After being a skeptic myself, I finally decided to switch when building my new rig a couple of months ago. To be honest, it is not anything like it was made out to be. It doesnt seem to be any buggier than XP was before SP2 and SP3. I have no real complaints with it actually. All issues I ran into were pretty minor and I was able to fix with a little knowhow. Granted, novices will probably be displeased because they wont be able to fix their small issues on their own but the same problem has existed through history with any new OS.

With that said, I am still looking forward to the added stability and performance that is bound to accompany the arrival of SP2.

[Lerianis]

Actually, I've found that with Vista, most people ARE able to fix their problems themselves, except when they have Microsoft Office installed and it gets corrupted..... that's a PAIN IN THE BUTT to fix, when that happens.

[jezmondo]

Vista is "New Coke". This is exactly what happened with new Coke, in blind taste test people loved it, but drink more than a couple of sips and their views changed.

Vista is the same way, show someone a demo running on a big PC with everything sorted - Vista looks great.

Put it on your own PC, or let some OEM install it while trying to keep the cost of the PC low and things are quite different.

This is Microsoft's problem, sure Vista runs well in the lab, but real life isn't like that. In the real world PCs don't have power to burn, PCs don't have as much RAM as perhaps they should, PCs have components without Vista drivers, OEMs load PCs with too much crapware. In the real world Vista barks and walks on all fours - no wonder we think it's a dog.

Microsoft aren't in a level playing field, Linux costs nothing - glitches and driver issues are forgiven (after all, if I paid nothing for the OS and applications I can probably buy a graphics card that works properly). Apple control everything on the Mac, the hardware (and can bend OS X to work properly with their parts) and the software load (no OEM crapware to spoil the customer experience).

The challenge for Microsoft is to counter that, and blind taste tests aren't going to do it.

[technewsjunkie]

These dopey people can't even recognize it!

But that is indeed how you make a commercial, or take a political poll - ask Fools (and tools).

Microsoft is even copying Apple's testimonial marketing strategy - Windows Switchers.

[technewsjunkie]

YOUTUBE will be fun to watch with inevitable "rebuttals".
Look out Microsoft, Mac users are pretty good with video!

[AlbooMED]

What makes you think YouTube is Mac only or that Win users are not good with video. Was it the "perception" that Macs are better at audio/video that Apple spread so well with its ads? That kind of proves the point of this experiment, don't you think.

[onlyauser]

In the 3D world many applications are not yet programmed for Vista so I really am better off and legitimately avoiding Vista. Almost as a career requirement. Until these developers say leap I won't. IMHO and for my needs the OS should be about application performance. Not useless bloat. I say if some consumers want cake and frosting let them install it themselves. Give me a lean mean speedy OS. That is all I want from you Microsoft.

Vista has more than a consumer perception problem when software developers choose to not adopt also.

[AlbooMED]

Developers are either lazy or they want you to fork over some $$ for the "next updated " version of their software. In my book, no excuse. Like it or not, Vista will be the dominant OS in a few years time. If you're a developers and avoiding Vista, you're stupid.

[DrtyDogg]

@AlbooMED

Actually we program to the lowest common denominator, and right now that means make sure it works on XP. I can't wait to use some of the built in goodies that are in Vista, but it's current market share means we have to build for XP and test on Vista.

[Penguinisto]

Dunno about the MSFT fanboi club and their ego-masturbations over .NET and all, but the poster wasn't talking about writing code.

The poster was talking about using 3D/CG apps on untested (and IMPO bloated and buggy) operating systems - and he/she is right. Until Autodesk, Alias|Wavefront, Discreet, Adobe, or the other biggies begin to say "okay, our stuff actually works on Vista now", you simply do not trust your projects, clients, artworks, and/or paychecks to it.

The funny thing is, you get something like 3DS Max (and VIZ), which uses C-DILLA (among other harebrained DRM schemes). It's enough of a trial getting that POS to validate on XP... now you want it to work on Vista? Pffft! Good Luck, Chuck.

--

Meanwhile, more and more developers only do .NET when they have to, and anything else when they want to (see also Open Source - very little .NET in that mass, and for good reason). I figure that in five years, Windows-only developers will either be forced to learn a real language, or wind up perpetually unemployed.

/P

[josmor]

Interesting... Virgin Galactic makes news also today in a place called "mojave"

[jeffgtr60]

Funny, one of my clients called me last week and I paraphrase "I installed Vista on my laptop 2 weeks ago, I just got so frustrated that I reformatted my hard drive and installed XP, Apple is going to be getting some of my money in a couple weeks" This coming from a diehard Windows user who chided me for switching to Mac. The people they interviewed sat down with vista in a controlled environment for a limited amount of time. I don't see this working for Microsoft at all. It is however a well put together piece, liked that they used Flash instead of Silverlight, that was encouraging.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Funny you should mention that. I had a customer with a MacBook Air that was so fed up with OS X that they wanted to know how to install Vista on the unit. The story works both ways and nobody can prove either is true or not. Both are as valid without proof.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Microsoft isn't trying to convince the readers of CNET. You guys already have made up your minds about Vista months before it came out and are so stuck in your mindset that it's horrible that you won't even acknowledge the possibility that you could be wrong. But Microsoft isn't going after closed minded geeks and tech folks. They are going after the people that only had ignorant people like those posting here that Vista was horrible- without actually using the product.

I think the videos are very telling. If you let people make their own decisions, you'll get a far different result than from the negative people who poison the minds of others with their hatred for all things Microsoft.

I'm sure people will get all upset about this opinion, but then that's the point. The people who will complain about my comments are exactly the sort of people that Microsoft is spending their time repairing the damage caused by misinformation and FUD.

[Penguinisto]

The videos are very telling - you take tech-illiterate people, guide them through a carefully-controlled "demo" on high-end equipment for five minutes, and then record them going gaga over something they're not stuck with using on a daily basis.

If MSFT were to let people make their own decisions, they'd still allow OEM's to offer XP pre-installed, no?

[Forked_Tongue]

They talk about "upgrading" to Vista, the hardware they used by default would come with it and we know current hardware used will most likely be at least a dual core with at least 2 gigs or more of ram to convince those at the demo about it's "speed". I would like for them to tell people to bring in their own computer to try out "Mojave" on and compare it when they're using low to mid end Celerons or Semprons, usually running whatever the factory installed on them for memory (anywhere from 256mb to 1gb, I repair computers for friends, family, and co-workers so I think I have a good grasp of reality of what people have and what they use). This is an apple to orange comparison, the majority of people usually don't buy the software alone to upgrade their system with, usually it's us system builders who do.

The only reason why many are using Vista is that it comes with the new laptop or desktop they bought recently to replace what they have, not that they were overly impressed with it but the reality is most people will will have somewhat better opinion of it due to being more impressed by the hardware it's on, not the interface it's running. If you really want to see a good comparison then setup the computer to dual-boot on the same hardware and see if the participants notice a difference, they will, the extra processes that Vista requires to run natively takes away from what an OS should do, that is a foundation for the applications that runs on top of it but with Vista those apps will have less resources to run on due to the OS using more than it should (my desktop is an Intel quad core with 8GB of ram running sli nvidia cards using a raid 5 sata drives, it's going run fast with whatever is on it but even with it's speed and resources I notice a slight lag with Vista Premium 64 bit compared to XP Home 32 bit and the two Linux distros I like to use, Xubuntu 64 and Puppy). I know I'm going to hear about some of us "tweakers" who'll tell me to "turn off unnecessary services" but then that's not what the average user would do would they? Microsoft should have considered this before releasing this in the wild because this is the reason why perception people have of Vista is reported from all the early adopters using it subpar gear (ie the insufficient memory, some single cores, and slower core processors of two years ago that only met the minimum spec to run the OS and not accounting for other apps running on top of it.) that it was sold on for the last two years.

I wish they could have an experiment where with identical hardware they have each OS represented such as Mac, XP, Vista, and maybe about 3-5 flavors of Linux (I'd like to see at least Fedora, Ubuntu, Damn Small Linux, Pendrive, and Puppy represented). I think people might be impressed with the appearance of the default background wallpaper, icons, etc initially but if they want to see sheer speed the last two Linux would show them what an OS should be for, a delivery system of other applications. How unfortunate most people will not get to read these comments and hear the voice of reason many of us have posted here and our experience with it.

[open-mind]

Analogy...

Most of you would probably say you don't like rabbit poop. But how many of you have really tried it? Like most people, you've probably just been lazy and based your opinion on what you've heard from others. But hey, it's a fact that many dogs really enjoy rabbit poop. If you can't trust cute little happy furry puppy dogs, who the heck can you trust? So who are you to judge rabbit-poop before actually trying it? What are you waiting for? Come-on people, stop being so closed minded. A nice rabbit-poop upgrade only costs $200.

;-)

[ejeon1989]

Want public perception of Vista to become good: Service Pack 2 better be worth the wait.

[SteamChip]

Why in the world after 18 months are they trying so hard to get people to load Vistink on their computers? With all the OEMs selling it preinstalled and most people too lazy or un-technical enough to remove it and put XP on there instead, Vistink will be on most machines anyway.

Oh wait.

Windows 7 is targeted to come out in by January 2010, only 18 more months away.

Better sell all the Vistink possible before then.

[Sidfin]

Well I have been running Vista and it is better than XP IF you have the machine for it. I have yet to crash it and I have tried just for fun by loading all sorts of old progs and marginal apps. I have opened enough windows to absolutely freeze my old XP machine or anything short of a PowerMac. For whatever reason people just hate MS and Gates even though he has given more money to charity than nearly anyone. The worst thing about Vista is having to listen to people complain about it and worship Mac and Linux. BTW I also run a dozen linux boxes at work and I love linux but it is a pain in more respects than Vista for office work.

[Mikeybabes]

Oh no. I agree Vista has bad PR and some of the criticism is unwarranted but one's thing for sure it isn't fast. No sir-ree. I have a T8300 notebook, 3 Gigs RAM, Radeon HD2600 graphics with 512MB VRAM. You would expect me to have a 'comfotable'' experience wouldn't you. Well it isn't. Just booting the darn thing takes almost as long as booting from an Ubuntu Live CD, I mean what exactly is it doing?! Shutting down - just as long, I mean shut down not hiberante.
The only reason I use it is because it came with the machine. I wouldn't buy it. on it's own. A part of me now wishes I had went Linux-Netbook. I mean my Notebook is a behemoth desktop replacement, so now it's slow, heavy and cumbersome to move around, as well as slow, heavy and cumbersome to operate.
Don't get me wrong I don't absolutely hate it, it has some nice touches and is trying to keep up with the Mac, I can certainly do more with it than Linux (e.g. play Windows games) but I sure wish it would move faster.

[reng2005]

This will likely go down in history as one of the greatest experiments in human psychology.

They're trying to prove that Vista doesn't deserve the widespread negativity it is receiving in society. Vista is not a piece of merde. If you simply give it a try, you will love it.

Yeah, right. The problem is, people *will* love it...initially. I did. So did Joe Wilcox at eWeek.

But familiarity definitely breeds contempt in the case of Vista. The longer you use this sad afterbirth of an operating system, the less love you feel. Its wireless network stack, for example, is unreliable (take my word for it).

It saps CPU and memory capacity like there's no tomorrow (I introduce as evidence my Dell Dimension 9200 Quad-Core PC with 3GB of RAM).

And certain applications, such as Deskshare's Video Edit Magic, trip over Vista again and again.

So, yes, you *will* be seduced by Vista's pretty face in the beginning. But just like a blonde bimbo of a gold digger, you'll very quickly grow tired of her and want to kick her out of the house and onto her sweet little ass...

Having personally used Windows Vista myself, I can assure that the hardware Microsoft used for this test was defiantly not a "Vista capable" box like the one we bought. Even with the minor upgrade to SP1 we continued to have a excruciatingly slow system. I am a Vista down grader, Windows XP SP3 is by far the better choice and with Windows search on XP I am fine and prefer the lack of eye-candy. I still think Mac / Linux is definitely the better choice, but having a pretty close to computer illiterate spouse I have to stick with what she is familiar with using.

Microsoft should really video tape people going through the whole upgrade process not just a controlled enviroment.

Im still not convince and still awaiting the "WOW" maybee next time, here is to Windows 7.

[g15host]

MSFT rather use Flash to promote Vista instead of its own technology of Silverlight - enough said.