Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Monday 11 August 2008, 8:56 AM
Microsoft's Mojave just a desert vista
Nevertheless, the things that The Economist and others have been saying about Mojave are true. If you missed it, it's a rather bizarre form of Pepsi Taste Test. A group of non-Vista users with strong anti-Vista opinions are shown a secret peek at Microsoft's next operating system, code-named Mojave. They love it – and are astonished when they're told it was Vista all along. The whole thing is as unreal as any reality TV, and if Microsoft's best experts can't put on a decent demo under controlled conditions that'll wow civilians then it's in worse trouble than any of us suspected.
None of this is necessarily important. The job of the advert is to rebuild the Vista brand in the mainstream: most adverts look crassly counter-productive to people outside their target audience, but they work. You and I, dear reader, are not the target audience. Microsoft has given up on us, at least for the time being; either we know too much or we're convinced we know too much, and the cost of converting the cynics in the industry is far too high. So Redmond is going for the less technical, casual computer user: who, after all, either buys or is bought the majority of Microsoft products and who thus exercise more influence than they realise.
Which is logical, but wrong. For most of the past twenty years, Microsoft has washed its hands of the casual computer user. It doesn't sell to them directly, and it certainly doesn't want to support them. Such tedious travails are the task of the OEM and the retailer – and us. Those of us who do understand IT are the unpaid phantom army who support the platoons of family and friends who don't.
And it's from people like us that the Mojave target audience get their impressions of Vista. Unwilling as we are to take on the additional burden of supporting something with a whole new set of problems and very little by way of important new features, it's not surprising that our advice has been uniformly negative. To some extent, that's because once you've got people on a stable system they understand you leave them there – I'm not going to get my XP'd parents onto Ubuntu either – but it's an indication of how little Microsoft understands the market it created that it really thinks Vista has enough going for it to counter that.
It's got another chance with Windows 7: if Microsoft wants to be more honest about what it does, add features that are actually useful and make it attractive rather than terrifying to make the change, then there'll be no need for another Mojave Experiment. We'll have done that work already.
PreviousComments on this post
It's sad when the response to the question "How much memory should I need for Vista?", requires the practised and truly well-worn line "As much as possible". I can’t think of anything worse than being roped into a test by Microsoft to test their new OS but that really isn’t anything new. Where has the All programs option vanish to this time, I wonder?
A big stumbling block is that the “casual computer user” obtains their new Operating system at the same time as purchasing their PC. With Vista having more versions that is actually needed it guarantees confusion before you have even got around to the specs. The PC is generally underpowered and so lacking that within one year the PC will be well on it’s way to grinding to a halt.
"Those of us who do understand IT are the unpaid phantom army who support the platoons of family and friends who don't."
That reminds me, A few years back I received a t-shirt embossed with the slogan "No, I will not fix your computer". Now apart from being the ideal t-shirt to wear into the office, it's also a damn fine idea to bring attention to the following facts:
* I'm in IT
* Just because it's Christmas doesn't mean I want to spend 2 hours in solitary confinement setting up your new computer/DVD/~#insert product here#~.
So far my friends and family Vista experience has been pretty good (I have some issues with Codecs on a 64 bit system but I think I've found workarounds for most problems).
Mum and dad support has been a pretty easy task after the initial setup pain of removing all the crap wear thats installed by the OEM (done as part of the move of their old PC to the new one) my problem list has been:
a) PC continually autoswitching the audio to an unconnect aux input (not really a vista problem) fixed I think by providing them with jack plug to short the input out.
b) After uninstalling office, then re-installing it windows mail lost the ability to do spell checking, reselecting the dictionary fixed this problem.
Other than that no problems that I can remember (you could check how my wife feels about Vista on her 300 quid cheapo laptop if we eventually arrange that drink we keep talking about)
Comparing this to my "eee" linux experience were I needed to recompile the kernel to get it to recognise my phone as a network device, Flash periodically crashes Firefox and I have to add repositories by hand to even get that far.
Life is better now that I've swapped over to Mandriva who have nearly all the support required for a eee out of the box (with the usual minor Wifi issues) but I still had to hand hack xorg.conf to stop the stupid synaptics tap and drag stuff running.
Finally did I really need to compile LAME to get MP3 ripping of CDs?
Linux ain't passing the mum and dad test, it barely passes the fat-hacker test. I keep thinking about the recent xkcd comic http://xkcd.com/456/ and reading the linux haters blog http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/ I keep sitting there nodding my head.
Ok...my wife uses a vista home rig as a business machine with no issues whatsoever. She works from home for a corp.
Now then...there are however issues with this rig. For some reason it will only play BBC DVDs and not comercial type movie ones. The last comercial movie I watched on it was tranformers (yes I know, but I just love those crystal clear effects on a sharp laptop screen).
As well...it doesn t want to know cheap generic type mp3 players.
It loves more expensive players and will interface with these.
Of course I will be reinstalling the optical drivers before I get too indepth with anything...but do I really want to, and should I really have to....in a word: NO!!!!
Microsoft's "Vista isn't really as bad as people say" publicity campaign is doomed. About the same time as the Mojave publicity stunt, Dell announced it's Studio Hybrid a tiny, cheap $499 (base configuration) desktop -- with Vista as the only operating system offered even though a look through the specifications makes it clear that Vista really isn't an appropriate choice for the hardware.
As compared to the "best foot forward" system selected by Microsoft for the Mojave stunt, an HP Pavillion DV 2500, 2.2 GHz, 2Gb RAM, Vista Ultimate, the $499 flagship version of the Studio Hybrid ships with Vista Home Basic "all the disadvantages of Vista and none of the advantages" rather than Vista Ultimate. It also gives up 340 Mhz (18%) in clock speed, 267 Mhz (50%) in front side bus speed, 3 Mb (75%) in L2 cache size, and 1 Gb (50%) in RAM. Worst of all, it uses the Intel X3100 integrated graphics module rather than the NVidia GeForce 8400M GS used by the HP. Depending on which benchmarks you prefer, the NVIdia is between 2.7 and 8.5 times faster than the X3100, and unlike the CPU, is the X3100 is the ONLY graphics option available on the Studio Hybrid.
The bad news is that as long as Microsoft continues to force vendors to cram Vista onto hardware that can't run Vista adequately and can't be upgraded to run Vista well, user storys about Vista being a deity condemned, reeking piece of post consumer food product will continue.
The worse news is that there are likely to be more $499 computers sold than $1200 computers sold, which means the "Vista is bad" stories will continue to outnumber the "Vista is good" stories.
The worst news is that the success of machines like the Asus Ieee 701 suggest that there is a significant population of users who are beginning to rely on Moore's law for a "same power, lower price" production evolution rather than the traditional "more power at the same price" product evolution. So the people who today are interested in buying $499 PCs that can't run Vista well, are in 18 months likely to be shopping for $200 - $300 PCs, that can't run Vista (or Windows 7, which is supposed to have a similar hardware footprint) well.
The “Mojave Experiment” - Just an exercise in guided clicking or does it highlight some of the problems with Windows Vista
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2306&tag=rbxccnbzd1
HP Pavilion dv2500t (Core 2 Duo 2GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD)
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/hp-pavilion-dv2500t-core/4505-3121_7-32451975.html?hhTest=1&tag=more
Studio Hybrid Details
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/desktop-studio-hybrid?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&ref=homepg
Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile Processor T7500
http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLA44
Intel Pentium Dual-Core Mobile Processor T2390
http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLA4H
Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) X3100
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Graphics-Media-Accelerator-X3100.2176.0.html
NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVidia-GeForce-8400M-GS.3709.0.html
Heard something from one of the guys at work recently about Vista. Our application software we use is made from Visual C 5, VB6 and Delphi 3 or 4. All of it remarkably old and only the Delphi application is non-Microsoft. (Delphi applications compile into a single executable not requiring a run-time and only relies on Win32 calls.) The VC5 and VB6, require the run-times, various ActiveX components, a couple of them non-Microsoft, and the full Win32 API.
Guess which applications run on Vista Business edition without complaint?
Yes the Borland Delphi application. The Microsoft applications crash and burn. He's duplicating an experiment I completed and reported on a year ago.
Yes MS knows that the IT staffs and developers are likely lost for the cycle till the next time around.
After having a good browse around the mojave experiment website, I noticed one little fact on the website that I find wonderfully droll.
"Security
Microsoft studies have shown that Windows Vista users are 60% less likely to be infected by malware than users running Windows XP SP2."
I don't meant to nit-pick but considering that Service pack 2 for XP was released just over 4 years ago, I wonder how much money Microsoft wasted in their studies, only to obtian a fact that my nan could have worked out?
Considering that SP3 has been out for 3 months why not compare the figure from that? or was the "wow" factor too low?
