Windows 7 Killed Windows Codename Mojave

Microsoft is currently riding the wave of immense success Windows 7 is having on the market, with over 175 million sold licenses to date, at just nine months since the operating system was launched. According to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Steve Ballmer, the company accounts for 94% customer satisfaction on Windows 7, and according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index survey from May 2010, consumer satisfaction with Microsoft is at an all-time high. But it wasn’t always like this. Just two years ago the software giant was really struggling, swimming against the current, armed only with a failed Wow.

A couple of years ago, in the summer of 2008, Microsoft pulled an experimental rabbit out of its marketing hat: Windows Codename Mojave. The concept fathered by David Webster, the then General Manager for Brand & Marketing Strategy at Microsoft, Windows Mojave was designed to highlight the perception vs. reality contrast in the context of Windows Vista.

Microsoft interviewed and polled 120 participants in San Francisco for Windows Mojave, which had a few critical aspects in common. All had given Vista a rating of less than 5 on a scale from 1 to 10 (in fact the average pre-rating for Windows Vista was 4.4), and none of them had actually used Windows 7’s predecessor. The participants were presented with a demonstration of what Microsoft called Windows Mojave, a moniker designed to hide the fact that the demo actually involved Windows Vista. Following the presentation Windows Mojave received an average rating of 8.5 from participants.

Essentially, the same group of people, had rated Vista with an average score of 4.4 without having tried the platform, but given Vista again a score of 8.5 on average after seeing the Mojave demo. Microsoft indeed made its point with the Windows Mojave experiment, underlining that the perception of Vista was much worse than the reality of the operating system.

I remember a conversation I had with a Windows XP user over a year ago. He told me that he avoided Windows Vista because of all the compatibility problems. This was after Microsoft released Windows Vista SP2, so there were no more issues with the OS, in reality. I asked him what applications/devices/hardware had he found to be incompatible, noting that I had used Vista for years and had no issues whatsoever. He retorted that all of them had problems playing nice with Vista. It turned out he had never used, or seen Vista running on a computer.

Windows 7 certainly has no perception problems. There have been critics, of course, but all negative opinions have been muted by the huge hype surrounding the operating system. Two years after the details of the Mojave experiment were made public, the website for the initiative greats visitors with the following message: “The Mojave Experiment has been completed and our researchers are now experimenting with Windows 7.”

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