Microsoft did an experiment similar to the Pepsi Challenge from years ago.
Microsoft asked people their opinions of Windows Vista then asked them to take a look at Mojave, a supposedly new version of Windows. See The Mojave Experiment. Not surprisingly, people had favorable things to say about Mojave. There wouldn’t have been a Mojave website otherwise. To Microsoft’s credit, they do give some details of the experiment on the website. When the participants were told that “Mojave” is really Vista, their reactions were very similar to the Coke fans who were told that they’d just chosen Pepsi.
There’s a deeper analogy between the Mojave Experiment and the Pepsi Challenge. One reason Coke fans often preferred Pepsi in a blind taste test is that they didn’t drink much of the samples. Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, and so people may prefer a sip of Pepsi to a sip of Coke, even if they would prefer a can of Coke to a can of Pepsi. People may be impressed with a demo of Vista but frustrated when they have to use it for a few days. On the other hand, I don’t doubt that many people have been prejudiced against Vista and would enjoy using it if they gave it a chance.
I think it’s amazing that Microsoft has to go down this path in the first place. Here’s a commentary by Dvorak, love him or hate him. http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/microsoft-stunt-sends-wrong-message/story.aspx?guid=%7B50FBBD7F%2D94FE%2D4986%2D98E5%2DD8BC81DA1770%7D
My only experience with Vista has been my son’s laptop. It has been less than pleasant, particularly regarding wireless connections. Based on this experience, the day to day aggravation of software that doesn’t work, or has to be patched, or an upgrade purchased has turned me terminally negative on the product. Spending so much money for an operating system to find out I have about $400 in additional software upgrade expenses has been less than a thrilling experience. It has nothing to do with the spiffy new interface, it has everything to do with cost.
Sounds like my interactions with Michelle’s iMac. The flashy GUI, the slick mouse gestures and animations to open/switch apps…the unbelievable frustration searching through forum after forum to resolve what should be a very simple problem – only to find out I have to go to the shell and type some UNIX command to globally alter something. You’re right…Pepsi is way too sweet, I’ll stick with my (XP) operating system.
I wonder how the same people would react to seeing Ubuntu with Compiz effects fully enabled. My guess is that they would probably like it at least as much as Vista in tests of this length.
My work computer now dual boots XP and (Unsupported) 64 bit Vista, and Vista definitely feels relatively sluggish. I think that with a faster quad processor (I’m running 1.8 GHz Core Duo), the difference would be a lot less noticeable. As far as I can tell, the killer app for Vista is 64 bit support, and PCs shipping with 4+ GHz of memory.