14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is mid-way on the road from Windows Vista to Windows 7, the next iteration of its Windows client, planned for availability no later than the end of January 2010. And following the release of Windows Vista Service pack 1, Microsoft is finding fertile soil to unveil Windows Codename Mojave - or the Mojave Experiment. Windows Codename Mojave was masqueraded as the next Microsoft OS and was demoed to over 100 Windows XP, Mac OS X, Windows pre-XP and Linux users. In fact, it was nothing more than Windows Vista.
"For those new to the Mojave Experiment, it's a focus group effort we initiated a few weeks ago. We interviewed and polled 120 participants in San Francisco, in hopes of better understanding everyday users' perceptions of Windows Vista and seeing whether there really is a gap between perception and reality. We wanted to see how people reacted to Windows Vista when they were not aware they were seeing Windows Vista. We recorded our discussions, and today you can see them for yourself," revealed Christopher Flores, Director Windows Communications.
Mojave is nothing more than a small part of a much larger Microsoft strategy to not only get its own version of the story out on the market but "fight back" the bad aura that is sticking to Vista even after SP1, and negative, anti-Vista publicity made by rival Apple. The official Mojave website went live on July 29, 2008, and it features the reactions of the participants in the Microsoft experiment when they find out that the demo they just witnessed is of Vista and not the next version of the Windows operating system. None of the participants had contact with Windows Vista prior to the experiment.
"We did not use some geeked out or custom built PC. We used an HP Pavilion DV2500. It had 2GB of RAM and was running an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz. The OS was a 32 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate. Of the 120 respondents polled, on a scale of 1:10 where 10 was the highest rating, the average pre-rating for Windows Vista was 4.4. After they saw the demo, respondents rated Mojave an average of 8.5," Flores added.