Microsoft's "Mojave Experiment"

Shaun Martin · 2008-07-31T10:52:48-05:00 (Thursday)

Check it out all you Windows haters.

http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/#

Bryan · 2008-07-31T14:05:21-05:00 (Thursday)

Now all they have to do is take in the millions of people that have that preconceived notion and convince them. Then they can do something for the millions more that have used it, and hate it.

raptor · 2008-08-01T09:17:04-05:00 (Friday)

I wonder if they let the OS boot before the users showed up. You know, that way they didn't wait 7 minutes.

Justin Camerer · 2008-08-01T12:34:35-05:00 (Friday)

sorry shaun... not convinced.

Shaun Martin · 2008-08-01T13:22:17-05:00 (Friday)

I personally enjoy my Vista Ultimate. I guess I'm the only one. However, I do plan on installing a flavor of Linux. ;D

Bryan · 2008-08-04T13:02:24-05:00 (Monday)

In all honesty, Vista is losing a lot of business out of common peoples preconceived notions. The operating system has a lot of problems that the tech savvy generation would notice, but probably not the people they have in these videos. The question that needs to be addressed is where they are getting these preconceived notions. It may be the media, but I'd bet a lot of it is from people like you and I trashing it. I can practically hear my aunts voice ringing in my ears saying, "oh, yeah I heard Vista wasn't any good. My nephew, you know 'the one who works in computers', told me about it."

Jeff Croxell · 2008-08-04T15:40:14-05:00 (Monday)

Basically a very biased test run by MS. Not like it is peer reviewed or scientific. Let them take it home for a month and do the interview. I am just happy to see originality - exact same commercial as Pizza Hut and Hardee's.

bandyguy · 2008-08-04T18:12:12-05:00 (Monday)

No doubt vista has some problems, but xp had far more when it came out. Anybody remember the huge security problems xp had? Vista has some nice advantages over xp too. Prefetch being my favorite (firefox comes up in about half a second). 64 bit has come a long way since xp as well. This is a very good thing as 4 gb ram is standard now, in a year it will probably be 6 to 8. The only big problem with vista is people's perception of it, largely responsible to the mac adds and Microsoft's failure to respond to the bad pr until now.

Bryan · 2008-08-05T06:49:52-05:00 (Tuesday)

I must have missed the memo that 4gigs is standard. afk buying 8 more gigs of ram for my 4 pcs.

Anyway, I'll admit my only exposure to vista was using my fiance's laptop. It wasn't a pleasant experience and the number of "are you sure.." type dialogs that popped up had me screaming "OF COURSE I'M F'ING SURE IF I WASN'T I WOULDN'T HAVE TOLD YOU TO DO THAT 132908Y13O;IN;KL13523" then rambling unintelligbly for 20 minutes while I tried to remember what it was I was trying to do in the first place. Meanwhile my fiance and 2 year old are staring at me with their jaws dropped.

Microsoft had the choice of how to handle stuff like they, and they very obviously decided, 'we'll let the user make an informed decision.' which is almost as bad as just telling them 'no.' It doesn't surprise me really. A former colleague worked on the Excel design team. The environment there is not conducive to good designs, and it usually comes out looking like a hodge podge of various designs with no cohesion.

Peter Motyka · 2008-08-05T15:19:52-05:00 (Tuesday)

Good for Microsoft with this experiment. The whole f*** Windows attitude really is stupid. Any modern OS is stable if you have half a clue of how to operate and maintain a computer. When I was a full-time Windows user, I'd have uptime of 30+ days without "crashing" or "BSOD". Actually, this is my screenshot from years ago running Win2k, 19 days of uptime:
http://caos.cs.siue.edu/gallery2/d/1854-2/pmotyko_desktop.jpg

So yeah, quit doing stupid s*** and any computer will be as stable as you want it to be :)

P.S.

OSX rocks!
~: uname -sr
Darwin 9.4.0
~: uptime
14:15 up 18 days, 15:26, 5 users, load averages: 0.58 0.68 0.71

Tony · 2008-08-10T00:37:45-05:00 (Sunday)

I am confused. I am kind of indifferent to Vista. I don't get either side of the argument. First, Vista isn't that bad. If you liked XP, you shouldn't have a problem with Vista. To me, it is almost the same thing but slower. I don't understand the people in this commercial. "It is really fast!" HUH? Since when? I have Vista, I am using it right now, and it isn't faster than XP or fast period. However, it isn't so slow that it would make a difference since you have to have 1 gig to run it anyways, you should have a good enough computer to start it up just fine. Which leads me to my first official grip about Vista or maybe Windows period.

With Vista 32 bit, and maybe all versions of 32 bit Operating Systems, it will not recognize more than 3gigs of ram. I have 4gigs and it only shows 3 lol. Weird.

The only other problem I have found with Vista is that Explorer crashes all the dang time. If you have a dir with a ton of files in it (small text files, or large pictures), it will just crash every now and then. Weird again.

However, other than those two things, I don't see much of a difference from XP other than looks and prettiness. But, if you are a Mac guy and you just love all the bells and whistles that come with OS X etc. then that is a different story. But as for performance it does the trick. Plus you get to use all the software that Windows has produced, which weather or not you like them all, they can be useful and less tech savy people love them.

Anyways, I just don't get what they did to make these people like it so much, and I don't know what Vista did to make people hate it so much. I guess it was produced by Microsoft and that is good enough?

William Grim · 2008-08-10T03:08:08-05:00 (Sunday)

Pete,

I find your OS X uptime to be bad news. You have not been upgrading your OS and rebooting when told. Shame on you!

-Will

P.S. I'm just kidding. However, I do find it necessary to reboot Windows, OS X, or most other OS pretty often. Security holes are found, and patches are released. A lot of times, the holes are in the kernel, and this requires reboots. If you're running a server farm with a good fail-over infrastructure, rebooting shouldn't even be noticeable by most people.

Having said all that, my FreeBSD and OS X boxes haven't been rebooted in quite some time. 1) I'm too lazy to do much upgrading and don't really use the items that cause the problems. 2) I enjoy doing other things with my time than making sure everything is safe and sound. 3) At work, I just let the admins handle it, mwahaha.

Bryan · 2008-08-10T09:54:49-05:00 (Sunday)

Quote from: Peter Motyka on 2008-08-05T15:19:52-05:00 (Tuesday)
Any modern OS is stable if you have half a clue of how to operate and maintain a computer.

You realize this statement pretty much excludes the large percentage of PC users, right? Afterall, Bonzai Buddy and Gator never would have been a talking point if it weren't for the fact that so many people were downloading them.