Vista Blind Taste Test | Hacker News Reader

Vista Blind Taste Test

mojaveexperiment.com

4 pointsmattmaroon19 comments

Lame. Watch the individual videos:

- a lot of MS:"this is really vista." pawn:"really?"

- a lot of MS:"Here, let ME show you _randomGadget_" pawn:"huh. wow."

One thing I notice is what few actual pawn responses are given, seem to be coming from people who either a) have never touched or seen Vista aside from this 5-10 min DEMO or b) have never touched or seen a computer aside from this 5-10 min demo or a kiosk at their local mall... Again, this is DEMOED by a MS rep - these pawns don't even get to touch the box or use Vista...

Vista looks pretty at first - thats about it - and that really all that is required to convince people that an OS's UI looks friendly with just an glance. The real trick is taking the OS home, putting it on your box and continuing to like it after the novelty wears off - exactly what did not happen. Instead, countless people, MS fans and haters alike, obtained Vista, installed and used Vista and then decided they did not like it.

I was really excited about Vista - until I used it for about 2 weeks... Then I became tired of the excessive boot times, the sluggish performance on app load and the general bugginess of it all - on my new dual core 2.4 ghz, 2GB machine... Then I installed Vista, run XP virtually and could not be happier... I have booted Vista several times over the past couple years to update and try it again - always go back to Linux...

But thats just this pawn's experience.

Precisely why this campaign is so shady. They're replacing glam for glam. It's nothing you can actually get an accurate reading from.

Is it really a blind test? I can't see any results. The video begins like an advertisement, continues like and advertisement, i'm not sure i can trust it, it doesn't look like it was done by an independent company.

I'd love to see the results of a usability test between OSX, various flavors of Linux, and varios versions of Windows. Asking first time users to acheive simple tasks like sending and reading email, using the web, storing and sharing pictures and listening to music.

Exactly. A proper test would have a control group - perhaps Windows XP with a different theme.

Also the applications wouldn't be selected for a particular outcome, eg, running on Vista.

I think that misses the point of this MARKETING CAMPAIGN ;) They don't want a real study, they just want something SHINY to show people...

Sounds like V-er, Mojave itself...

Great. I can see positive responses that a person may have to a demonstration of Vista by a trained salesperson.

We have no idea how many thousands of people Microsoft had to go through in order to elicit these few positive responses.

I work in IT and Vista is just a major headache. It's fine once you get used to it and turn off all the flashy features, but at that point it's hard to see the difference between it and XP. There are a lot of changes for the sake of change, and many of them hurt usability a lot. For example, the old Network Connections control panel has been changed and hidden multiple mouse-clicks deep for no real reason. What if I want to enable a network adapter? There's no easy way to do it!

Maybe the next version of Windows will bring real changes that make sense, rather than slapping a pretty face on an old OS and changing things around just enough so people don't notice it's the same thing.

Gotta give it to MS, this one is brilliant from an advertising perspective. As so many pointed out here, it isn't valid science, but it isn't meant to be. It points out that people expect Vista to suck from what they read, but when they try it they actually like it.

Could this be the start of Microsoft finally not sucking at advertising?

Nah. It was pointed out already that this is the same idea that Gerber tried with its "real people" foods a while ago. It's a clever idea, but it doesn't spread enough via word-of-mouth to actually negate negative feelings.

I'm guessing MS is planning on spreading this by a lot more than word of mouth. They're launching a humongous national campaign in all forms of media, on which they'll probably spend more than the entire worth of Gerber.

I can't even find any info on this Gerber Real People (though I only tried searching for that) but my guess is they have little or no similarity. And there are plenty of viral ads that actually did work, including one by Microsoft promoting Halo.

But that one worked because people liked the looks of Halo to begin with. You can't get around a common mentality by pointing that mentality out. People don't change that logically.

Why do you consider this ad, that presents itself as a blind test but is clearly not, brilliant?

Because the <1% of the population that would realize it's not valid science is entirely outside of their target demographic. The point of the ad is to make people think "maybe I've been wrong in believing the bad stuff I read about Vista" and this will accomplish that with almost all of the people who see it.

I just think word of mouth is usually stronger than any marketing campaign, so if people are telling their friends that they hate something, trying to convince them otherwise throught advertising looks to me like a waste of money and time.

Anyway, most people who buy a computer and don´t buy a mac can´t escape from vista, linux is not mom ready yet, so why waste time convincing people to choose vista rather than telling them they may need a new computer?

Because people have a choice between Windows and a Mac. MS, for the first time in as long as anyone my age can remember, has a viable competitor.

In case anyone's wondering, the site is registered to Microsoft. But anyway the presentation is so shiny it's obvious it's an ad. (From the stating the obvious dept.)

This is a no more a blind "taste test" than if Pepsi hadn't allowed their pawns to actually sip the cola, but just described to them how good it was. Ridiculous in the extreme.

Didn't the 'blind taste testers' realize the OS was running slow as molasses?

"Slow" isn't a problem when it's a new install. Given a completely new installation, Vista looks nice. So the marketing is deceptively pointing out a deception.

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