Microsoft struggles to repair Vista's image
Thrax
🐌Austin, TX Icrontian
Since Windows Vista's January 2007 release, Microsoft has been fighting an uphill battle to repair its beleaguered reputation. Windows Vista has not been hailed as the revolutionary new operating system that they intended. Rather, it has been met with complaints, criticism and sluggish uptake in the ever-important business and enthusiasts sectors.
Despite strong sales on OEM boxes, Microsoft is suffering from depleted mindshare and a lack of consumer confidence. To remedy this, Microsoft has pulled off -- with staggering speed -- the "Mojave" program designed to bring back the faith. Microsoft has collected scads of unhappy Vista users in California and shown them a "New" operating system code-named Mojave. After a stunning 90% of the candidates stated that they liked what they saw, it was revealed that it was none other than Windows Vista powering their positive impressions.
This campaign comes at a crucial time in the longevity of the Vista operating system. Regardless of whatever technical merit it may or may not have, what people are saying and hearing is overwhelmingly negative. Microsoft hopes that the recordings of people's experiences with the Mojave experiment will help bolster their image when the footage is aired in commercial format.
This ambitious plan chases the heels of various recent internal memos. Steve Ballmer recently wrote that, "In the weeks ahead, we'll launch a campaign to address any lingering doubts our customers may have about Windows Vista." "And later this year, you'll see a more comprehensive effort to redefine the meaning and value of Windows for our customers."
So as Vista stretches into its second year of life, no more popular with the loud and listened-to voices than it has been, it seems Microsoft is digging in to fight a massive uphill battle.
Despite strong sales on OEM boxes, Microsoft is suffering from depleted mindshare and a lack of consumer confidence. To remedy this, Microsoft has pulled off -- with staggering speed -- the "Mojave" program designed to bring back the faith. Microsoft has collected scads of unhappy Vista users in California and shown them a "New" operating system code-named Mojave. After a stunning 90% of the candidates stated that they liked what they saw, it was revealed that it was none other than Windows Vista powering their positive impressions.
This campaign comes at a crucial time in the longevity of the Vista operating system. Regardless of whatever technical merit it may or may not have, what people are saying and hearing is overwhelmingly negative. Microsoft hopes that the recordings of people's experiences with the Mojave experiment will help bolster their image when the footage is aired in commercial format.
This ambitious plan chases the heels of various recent internal memos. Steve Ballmer recently wrote that, "In the weeks ahead, we'll launch a campaign to address any lingering doubts our customers may have about Windows Vista." "And later this year, you'll see a more comprehensive effort to redefine the meaning and value of Windows for our customers."
So as Vista stretches into its second year of life, no more popular with the loud and listened-to voices than it has been, it seems Microsoft is digging in to fight a massive uphill battle.
0
Comments
You can take two different guesses of this - Microsoft rigged the event with a non-standard version of Vista or rather, Microsoft introduced a bunch of semi computer literate users to Vista on properly configured machines. I have no knowledge of what really happened but I'd lean more towards the latter.
No - I'm not biased towards or against Vista. I've only used it for a few minutes at computers in store displays.
What Microsoft is doing is repairing Vista's image to sell a lameduck OS rather than "repair" Vista to restore the image they should not have lost with XP.
I'm sorry if this generates more heat than light, but I think we should be doing a 64-bit OS by now with a fairly seemless transition. Especially if they're going to charge $2-400 for it. That has not happened, and my challenge for Microsoft is to do so.
Much of that 90% of computer users to whom you refer probably do not have computers fully suitable for running Vista and probably don't know how to properly configure Vista setups. I know hardware, that's for sure, but I don't know how to configure Vista for best performance. Someday when I'm tired of XP, I'll move on. Right now though, XP meets my needs just fine and is completely reliable across several home and office machines.
On a DV2000 with 2GB RAM, you say... Now I really want to see.
My complaints against Vista have never been against the visuals. You either like them or you don't. My complaints are that it's sluggish it's organized poorly and unless you are easily wow'd by some pretty transparency effects the visuals actually get in the way of the functionality.
I can jingle my keys at a bunch of 1 year olds and they'd be impressed. Doesn't mean I've got the next best think in child's toys. By the same token you can take pretty much any OS and show the features you want to highlight to a room full of average people and impress them. It's like any good illusion. You only show what you want them to see and only ever show the angles you want them to see it from.
There commercials from this event will be like any lame ass movie commercial that interviews people walking out of the movie. It'll be filled with quotes like "I saw it" and "I didn't know windows could do that" or "Wow Vista".
Just a thought.
But maybe they just gave the users 10 minutes of free reign with Vista... I dunno about your experiences, but I've spent more than 10 minutes with Vista on an out-of-the-box Dell they got here at my office trying to get it on our network and mapping drives. I didn't enjoy it. The staff member here who had to use it didn't enjoy it, and she's about as computer illiterate as they come. I'd love to see a blind test documenting normal people's first ten minutes with Vista. I bet the looks on people's faces would be priceless.
The point isn't so much "what you can sell in 10 minutes" as much as it is "look how bad a perception you had of Vista with ZERO hands-on experience with it."
Yes, it was run by a salesperson, but it was their own self-professed interests, and none of them even so much as tried to use Vista in that capacity. They just listened to their nerdy tech friends and the media who think it's trendy to bash Vista and stuck their heads in the sand. I won't deny that Vista at launch wasn't a whole bucket of fun, but people who continue to operate on that now-flawed impression and feed this advice to their friends are the ones that this experiment was geared towards. Let's get normal people looking at Vista from a standpoint of what they want to do with it and see what comes out - and what came out was a 4-point bump.
I'm kind of tired of defending it, but nothing pains me more than biased assumption.
We did so many installations of XP that I was working overtime to do it.
That's exactly what I said. It wasn't great when it came out. Now people are just playing off old biases.
This is massively different then sticking someone in front of a computer and letting them try to figure it out. That is where vista fails. Daily I have to deal with someone that was running XP, got a new machine with vista installed on it and they can't figure out how to do familiar things that they did in the past. Their immediate perception is that Vista sucks.
Telling them that Vista is fantastic when viewed through the blinders of a sales guy doing their tasks for them proves nothing. Perhaps it does prove something, Vista is a useable opperating system if you have someone around that will get it to do what you want it to as long as you don't have to do it yourself.
Regardless of the actual backend benefits that Vista brings. It's just a modern day WindowsME. Even perhaps more painful of a pill to swallow is that they are pushing hard to get poeple to stepup to Vista, when their next OS is only a couple years away. So for business it becomes even more pointless to upgrade to Vista when it's already becoming redundant.