Microsoft is going to launch their fresh attempt at marketing Windows Vista tomorrow, entitled the "Mojave Experiment" (pronounced mo-have-ee – after the desert).
Microsoft has faced a lot of negative press about Vista, right from the early days, e.g. 2003. The hardware requirements were pretty steep when it was launched compared to what people had bought in the previous few years. Heck, I remember reading the requirements in 2003 when we’d ordered hundreds of PC’s and thinking that we might never run Vista – it required hardware that wasn’t publicly available back then. When it hit the market in late 2006, there was plenty of hardware on the market that wasn’t really suitable but people bought it with/for Vista and had a bad experience.
Then there’s the OS itself. A lot has changed. I’m not a big fan of the network management in it (I am a fan of the new network stack!). I’m also not a fan of renaming and moving things about for the sake of it. Some things just seem hardware for the sake of it. The security is locked down some. A lot of legacy applications just won’t work on Vista so that’s messed up organisations with large application catalogues. Comments like "give out to your suppliers" or "Use compatibility toolkits" don’t go down well with those organisations because they see that as unnecessary work – XP runs just fine as is so why upgrade for what they see as an upgrade for the sake of upgrading?
I think MS might have gotten things all messed up. I remember hearing the story of how MS were trying to market how "pretty" Vista is. What? Why does a corporate want to hear about pretty? When Vista was launched all we saw was the new <ALT-TAB> and stories about some granny in the USA who wanted to burn photos on her DVD drive. Why would a university or bank care about that? The home user was alienated too. The OS changed so much that old hardware was insufficient and trusted home applications or peripherals no longer worked. How’s a home user expected to resolve those issues? They barely know how to use Office and print.
What ended up happening is that most business consumers shrugged their shoulders and kept deploying XP. Home users complained about poor performance and old purchases not working anymore. CIO’s and CEO’s happen to be home users. These decision makers saw trouble at home and didn’t want that experience on their networks. The jungle grapevine is powerful too. I see it all the time at social occasions when I’m asked about a prospective new PC purchase and someone pipes in about Vista being awful.
Vista isn’t awful, but I think it’s gotten mixed up. There are some vast improvements and some things that aren’t great at all.
So MS is going to tackle the perception that Vista is awful. They rounded up loads of people in San Francisco who disliked Vista. They sat them down in front of a PC, asked them to try an operating system and video recorded their experience. Surprise! It was Vista all along. The videos will be played online starting from tomorrow (probably night Irish time).