I have a habit of sticking up for the big boys sometimes on this blog. This post is another example of just that. Firstly I need to admit that I downgraded my new laptop to XP Pro – Vista is just too buggy, too hard and not sufficiently compelling in my experience. I think Microsoft made some serious mistakes both technological and marketing-wise with Vista.

However I have to agree with Mary Jo’s post where she asks;

how users would react if “Apple” (or insert other vendor name here) had launched its own version of the Mojave Experiment. What if Apple tried to recover from its MobileMe mess by showing users who had heard that Apple’s successor to .Mac was a disaster a new version, code named “Gobi”? Then — surprise — users were told it was really MobileMe.  I’m sure commentators would be raving about Apple’s marketing prowess and savvy –not about Apple’s lying, cheating ways

I’ve got to agree – while Vista is a right royal balls up – the fact is that the Mojave experiment is savvy marketing. The fact is that Mojave doesn’t address the issues around Vista – it blind tests a UI and doesn’t look at the real issues around Vista – drivers, networking, security conflicts etc – but none of that really matter to Jo public whom Mojave is targeted to – Jo public heard some bad things about Vista and will be pretty well reassured by Mojave – from a mass-market perspective that’s a success.

So sure – Vista sucks – but Mojave, at an aggregate level, is probably a good campaign.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

2 Comments
  • Hi there, thanks for a great blog, always fun to read.

    I felt compelled to reply to this post, however. Have you tried running Vista for an appreciable length of time? I’ve been using it since the Longhorn days, when it WAS buggy and painful. But since the code went gold it has been just fine.

    Vista is an astonishing improvement over XP. There are no “security conflicts” at all. There are no driver issues (except for antiquated hardware for which manufacturers are too lazy to release fresh drivers – certainly that’s not Microsoft’s fault). Granted, there were some performance issues with networking – all fixed since SP1.

    The truth is that journalists and tech-savvy bloggers fall into two camps; those who actually use Vista and know it’s not a painful train-wreck of an operating system, and those who bitch and moan about it citing “problems” that don’t exist – or are nothing at all to do with any kind of “flaw” in the OS.

    But don’t take my word for it. Please – do some proper research. And consider that almost-200-million Vista users around the world are happily getting-on with life. They’re not all downgrading to XP. And they’re also not all bemoaning the new OS as you are, confidently claiming “Vista sucks…”

    This smacks of lazy journalism, sir. I enjoy what you write most of the time, but this throwaway entry was of little use except perhaps if all you really wanted to do was fill column-inches with yet-more Vista-bitching. As if the Internet needs more of that…

    Thanks for your time

    Liam
    London

  • @Liam – cheers for your comment. I have to admit my only experience with Vista was on a Dell laptop with the first release. After not being able to network in a mixed XP/Vista environment, and not being able to run most of my peripherals, I downgraded to XP.

    I’d be willing to give Vista another go – if MS wants me to be a real-life Mojave trialist I’d give it a go

    😉

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