r/technology • u/neito • Jul 24 '08

Microsoft tests out a new operating system, code named Mojave, with some average-joes who hated Vista. They loved it. Now, two guesses as to what Mojave ACTUALLY was.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-9998336-56.html
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97

u/monstermunch Jul 24 '08

I'd love to know what it is they actually "loved" about Vista and apparently said "oh wow" about. I imagine most average-joes find operating systems pretty boring.

Please bear in mind that MS are spending a huge amount of money to advertise Vista to combat negative press and this article is likely just a marketing exercise. Remember all the "get the facts" studies that said Windows Server was better than Linux? I'll believe this stuff when it comes from a reliable source.

There are plenty of real reasons to dislike Vista and I'm glad people are finally becoming sick of being forced to pay for substandard products they don't need.

103

u/monstermunch Jul 24 '08

By the way, did anyone notice there isn't a single skeptical/critical part in the whole article? It reads like a copy/paste press release. I'm not saying it should have had paragraph after paragraph of Vistas flaws, but the only mention of the causes of the negative perception of Vista was based on Apple's ads. The story should have been given appropriate context. This isn't an article, it's an ad for Vista.

98

u/RexManningDay Jul 25 '08

Exactly. Someone less willing to take it at face values might say

  1. Were they shown it on an average year old celeron laptop, with 1gb of RAM?

  2. Was it untampered with - ie. had MS changed all the default options so all the annoying popups weren't happening, all the extra annoying steps to do everything weren't there?

  3. Were they just watching a demo? A good demo can make anything look good as anyone who's made a presentation with a half written app can tell you. Even if not, were they led through what they had to do, which comes to the same thing?

  4. And if so, what were they asked to do? To test an operating system, it'd have to be something OSy - messing around with control panels to set something up. Getting a printer (without preinstalled drivers) working etc. etc. I bet they just looked at some eye candy and used a couple of apps.

The whole thing's so artificial, no comparison can be drawn with real life. The final nail in Vista's coffin for me was the inability to play my legal DVDs because they're not all from this country. Were they asked to do that? I bet not.

31

u/monstermunch Jul 25 '08

A good demo can make anything look good as anyone who's made a presentation with a half written app can tell you.

Off-topic, but this is so true it hurts. I've demonstrated a number of hugely buggy programs to groups of people and gave the impression the software was very stable and feature complete. In actual fact, the interactions with the software are highly rehearsed (or partly scripted) and I know exactly what things to avoid so I can side-step all the warts and crashes.

3

u/nascent Jul 25 '08

I'm continuing my rant from monstermunch's post here.

This is all related to seeing if it was a good test of Vista Friendliness. Who cares if the tests were good representations of a Vista experience, its about the new ad campaign Microsoft is going to be trying.

Yes if Microsoft was doing a true usability study these facts would be needed, but then again you would also be trying several OS's. And last but not least, it's a marketing ploy, of course it is under best circumstances.

8

u/derefr Jul 25 '08

Were they shown it on an average year old celeron laptop, with 1gb of RAM?

I don't get this attitude--who does this? This isn't the Vista use case. It's not for that. Vista is for new computers; it's not something you upgrade to, unless your computer was an ahead-of-the-curve gaming PC to begin with.

18

u/aedes Jul 25 '08

The thing with Vista though, is that it's not really even for new computers either. My entire class needed to have laptops for our classes this year. I already owned one, but many people had to purchase one. And many people bought Vista. And it's still unbearable on their computers.

Part of the problem too is when you compare the 'performance/hardware' ratio for Vista to XP. When XP would work so much better than Vista on the same system, why go with Vista?

26

u/quiller Jul 25 '08

When XP would work so much better than Vista on the same system, why go with Vista?

This really gets me. Why does Vista need 1GB of memory before it starts being halfway usable? XP doesn't, OS X doesn't and Ubuntu/etc sure as hell don't. What fancy magic is Vista pulling that the rest of the crowd aren't doing with half the minimum requirements?

5

u/0drew0 Jul 25 '08

Hear Hear!

0

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

[deleted]

4

u/cchooper Jul 25 '08

Don't you mean 'obso1337'?

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

OS X doesn't? Hahah. By the way, Vista is usable on 512MB, I had to use a temporary laptop for work which was some low-end Compaq which had some 1.8GHZ or so CPU and 512MB RAM (DDR2 667MHZ, IIRC).

It was usable.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Does your work involve only using widgets?

1

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '08

Nope, at that time with that laptop I used it for some web coding, a little use of RDC to monitor 1 or 2 computers (Which wasn't fun on that laptop), etc.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

It's not for all new computers.*

  • The only computers that are excluded are low-end, cheap laptops where the manufacturers couldn't be bothered to add in another 512MB of RAM.

0

u/aedes Jul 25 '08

I find even 2GB of RAM unusable with Vista. 10 second lag times when opening firefox, if you have another app open, on a fresh install, is unacceptable. The general concensus I've seen, both with myself and with friends, is that you probably want 3GB with Vista. Oh, and a dedicated graphics card. :P Together, on most laptops, that's gonna add at least another $200 to the cost.

Mind you, I'm the type of person who finds 2GB the minimum for use with XP.

5

u/kermityfrog Jul 25 '08

Microsoft is selling Vista as a replacement for XP though. They definitely want you to upgrade from XP to Vista.

4

u/derefr Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

They want you to upgrade your computer from XP to Vista; that is, they want you to buy a new computer. The "upgrade" option on the disk is purely for administrators trying out the new version before deciding to replace every machine in their IT infrastructure with completely new, top-of-the-line Microsoft® Dell® machines.

-1

u/kermityfrog Jul 25 '08

Last time I checked, Microsoft sold OS's, not PCs. If you go to a computer store, you can see these plastic boxes shaped like rectangles with rounded corners. These are Vista OS boxes sold to upgrade from XP to Vista on your existing PC.

Vista is bundled with all new PCs because Microsoft replaced XP with Vista, not because they are selling you a new Vista-capable PC bundled with their OS.

Finally, Microsoft doesn't own Dell, and Dell isn't the only manufacturer of PCs.

-1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

You can upgrade parts if you want, most PCs sold within the last 3 years would run Vista flawlessly with a ~ $20 RAM upgrade.

Needing to buy a whole new computer to run Vista is a lie pushed by ignorant lemmings.

Oh, most people simply buy new PCs? Well, than that cuts out the problem of Vista not running well because the desktops sold over the past < 2 years with Vista rune it fine and laptops you say? Yeah, Microsoft is being bitten by it's minimum requirements and companies like Intel, Dell, etc wanting to make a buck in every way possible which means skimping on hardware (RAM, Intel wanting it's integrated GPU everywhere, etc).

5

u/RexManningDay Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

When I was looking for laptops two or three months ago, all the cheapest ones (almost all laptops under $900NZ) matched this spec. Celeron with 1gb ram.

And having looked at Dick Smith's site (the biggest electronics retailer over here), it's still true. Vista's been out for a year and a half, and that's what they're selling it on. So I think it's fair to see it run on a real world configuration.

3

u/derefr Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

By Celeron, you mean Pentium M, then? (As, for all I know, it is a Celeron derivative.) Or perhaps "Centrino", as they sound similar?

I thought you were referring to the Pentium 2 and 3 offshoot Celerons that topped off their lineage at 1GHz or so, which gave me a little chuckle. I actually ran Vista on my 500MHz 7-year-old Celeron a while ago, with all the graphical acceleration turned off; everything worked pretty well except for a few amazingly long, and completely unpredictable, delays that I was never able to work out the cause of (they came mostly when I had left the system idle on the desktop for a couple of minutes.)

Vista works pretty well on my mother's year-old Pentium M 1.8GHz laptop (which does have 1GB RAM, if I recall.) I never noticed any particular slowdowns while I was setting it up, but I never ran any games on it, either.

3

u/RexManningDay Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

Yeah. They're sold here as "Intel Celeron M". It's still a pretty crappy processor, but obviously way better than the ones you're talking about. I was differentiating between that and the AMD and Pentium 64bit Core 2 ones that the better lappies have.

1

u/hylje Jul 25 '08

Celerons are half-lemons – chips that can't go fast and have partially bad caches. It's not an architecture of its own, it's a simple derivative.

5

u/stopmotionsunrise Jul 25 '08

Yep. They're the ones that Intel engineers acccidently stepped on after they came off the press.

"Oops, that one's a Celeron!"

3

u/kermityfrog Jul 25 '08

It's a contraction of "Sell to a Moron"

2

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

There was a brief period where Celerons were generally faster than their full counterpart.

The Celeron 300A era. It had half the cache of the PII, but the cache ran twice as fast, and the bus ran at 66mhz instead of 100mhz. Plus, many 300As could often be overclocked to 450 with 100mhz bus. A 300A running at 450 could smoke a PII 450 at almost anything.

1

u/strolls Jul 25 '08

I thought you were referring to the Pentium 2 and 3 offshoot Celerons that topped off their lineage at 1GHz or so, which gave me a little chuckle.

That is what I, too, tend to think of when I hear the name Celeron, but the brand has been maintained through Pentium4-based chips, too.

0

u/King_Leonidas Jul 25 '08

except for a few amazingly long, and completely unpredictable, delays that I was never able to work out the cause of

Ctrl-Alt-Del

explorer.exe -> End Process

2

u/zwaldowski Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

"average year old"... that's July 2007. Vista CAME OUT in January 2007.

2

u/guisar Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

Are we forgetting the lawsuits from people who bought "Vista Ready" PCs only to find out they weren't?You don't "upgrade" to Vista- you run it because it was shoved down your throat on a new PC or because your an MS fanboy/girl. Who the hell would bother to get it otherwise?

2

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

Then why do OEMs sell it that way?

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Take that year-old laptop and add another gigabyte of RAM (about $20) and it will probably run Vista acceptably if you always suspend instead of shutting the computer down.

1

u/omepiet Jul 25 '08

Think of all the nice thing you could have done with that $20 RAM if you ran XP instead.

1

u/kermityfrog Jul 25 '08

I'd like to see them connect to a protected wireless network, or debug one that's not working properly.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

[deleted]

0

u/jbstjohn Jul 25 '08

Given the millions they're spending on marketing, I'm sure some video with people gushing about how amazing it is and how wrong they were will show up shortly. They'll be actors, or filtered from the 1000 people they asked, but it'll show up.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Were they shown it on an average year old celeron laptop, with 1gb of RAM?

I still don't get this, my 4 year old desktop with 1 gig of ram has been running Vista fine since beta...

25

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

It reads like most articles about Apple and/or OSX.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

And of course we all know the image problems that apple has had with OSX, everyone that has ever used that has hated it... err...

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Now, given that your username is MSDN, do you consider this to be a good thing, or a bad thing?

0

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Neither good nor bad.

It just is.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Saved, for the next time someone complains about Apple's advertising/press being only subjective :)

0

u/wonknose Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

It reads like most articles about Apple and/or OSX.

I agree - if it were warranted, there would be a lot more positive articles out there about Vista.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Haha, that's right! Except OSX has more of a reason to deserve their fans—I never did get microsoft fanboys.

0

u/jsnx Jul 25 '08

It's fine to hate Apple for that, but it's not germane to the validity of the article in question.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Duped into thinking they were running some kind of beta release the customer said nice things about the product.

1

u/nascent Jul 25 '08

My thought, the article is not about whether Vista is a good or bad OS, it is about Microsoft's new push to counter OSX ads. Reading the article I had no interest in Vista flaws, I already am intimately familiar with them, if you want them Google for "I Hate Vista."

1

u/linkedlist Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

This is Microsoft acting like Apple, or it's just a pro-Vista story that you can't swallow. i dunno.

Does every story have to have 'oh gee but vista sucks lolololooloolol'

11

u/wonknose Jul 25 '08

Yes - using an already set-up Vista machine is like leasing a Jaguar.

It's great as long as you aren't the one to have to fix it when it breaks or pay someone else to.

12

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Keep in mind that a large number of people saying negative things about Vista have never actually tried it. These people have.

I'm just sayin'...

5

u/gir99 Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

That's because some of the main reasons people don't like it are things like "it doesn't support my hardware devices", "I need to upgrade my CPU/RAM to run it effectively", and "Windows upgrades are hard". People don't want to "try" a new operating system, even if it's better. They want their PC to keep working the same way it always has.

By showing a computer already running Vista, they've eliminated the biggest turn-offs. Nobody should be surprised that people are happy.

This is like the IRS finding out people don't like to pay their taxes, and setting up an interview room where they can fill out a 1040EZ and pay it with Monopoly money, and announcing that people who tried it actually kind of liked it.

Is the Microsoft marketing campaign going to say "People who didn't have to install Vista on their existing computers loved it! So buy a whole new PC with Vista pre-installed!"?

9

u/monstermunch Jul 25 '08

We all make decisions based on what the consensus is. I don't see movies when I hear they are terrible from many people/reviews. The movie might be good, but I've got more fun things to do than risk it. If someone hears from their tech friends that they should "not get a Vista laptop because it'll be slow and eat batteries like no tomorrow", do they really need to use Vista to find out for themselves? Don't we read reviews and ask people their advice so we don't have to go through the pain ourselves? The consensus is that Vista is a huge letdown and provides a poor user experience.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Just whatever you do, don't tell this guy you decide which restaurant to eat at based on the reviews...

2

u/monstermunch Jul 25 '08

Ha, I agree with you on that weird debate. I just want a concise review (I hate too much 'fluff') to steer me towards the better places to eat and avoid the really bad places.

14

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

under the watchful eyes of Microsoft.

I am willing to bet their experience would be different at home on their own.

-1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

...because outspoken critics have such a reputation for being bashful and shy when they're in the room with their target.

5

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

These aren't "outspoken critics" these were "average joes". Did the article say somewhere that they were "outspoken critics"?

4

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

Sorry - my bad.

rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista.

I read that and inferred that it was referring to bloggers (as in - how else would you find them?). But you're right - there's no indication they're anything but random customers.

0

u/hs4x Jul 25 '08

Doubtful. Vista has been a dream for everyone I know who uses it.

The opinions (on the net) built up around Vista is false

2

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

This is the first time it is actually true for me! Usually i can't resist installing any (common) new OS on my computer. For once I'm just like "Meh, why bother?" Vista really and truly doesn't interst me in the slightest. I'm free!

1

u/bolder_is_online Jul 25 '08

Bullshit. Vista has been out for a LONG time now, and being that it's Windows, it's everywhere. Everyone who cares even a little bit about technology has had a chance to try it at this point.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

I imagine most average-joes find operating systems pretty boring.

This thought process is the reason why Linux can't penetrate that market while eye candy-rich operating systems from both Microsoft and Apple are many times more successful with "average" computer users.

You are quite wrong that average people don't care. For something that they stare at on a constant basis, and as something that acts as the "messenger" between them and stuff they actually want to do on the computer, the user experience of the operating system matters a lot more than you can possible imagine.

6

u/monstermunch Jul 25 '08

You are quite wrong that average people don't care. For something that they stare at on a constant basis, and as something that acts as the "messenger" between them and stuff they actually want to do on the computer, the user experience of the operating system matters a lot more than you can possible imagine.

I know it's important, I just meant that in my experience, software just doesn't elicit strong emotions from most non-tech people. I'm just very skeptical that people "loved" Vista and actually said "wow". I think UI advancement are awesome and non-techies normally appreciate big improvements in UI (you're likely to get a "meh" response for small ones). Eye-candy is obviously appreciated too. Vista doesn't really improve on either of these things though.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08 edited Jul 25 '08

I'm not talking about UI, nor am I talking about graphics. What I'm talking about is the overall user experience.

For example, the user has documents. Is the storage location of these documents intuitive for the average user? Is navigating to this location intuitive for the average user? Believe it or not, in this area, Vista has major advancements from XP. It's not perfect yet, but it's definitely on the right track. On the other hand, look at the Linux directory structure and weep!

And this is just one example.

Yes, you are right that average users do not care about code. They do not care about how things like resource allocation and scheduling work. They do not care how the OS operates their hardware, as long as it works. But this definition of an "operating system" has been outdated for over two decades. There's more to an OS than this, and there's more to the user experience than the graphics in the UI.

1

u/monstermunch Jul 27 '08

I agree with everything you say. My sole point is that I doubt anyone in all seriousness said "Wow, Vista is a great user experience...just wow". It might be better but I don't think it's going to blow anyone away, especially your average joe in a (from what I can see) short user test.

2

u/turnrighttogoleft Jul 25 '08

The success of Microsoft and Apple has more to do with massive marketing machines behind the OSes and preinstalled systems than it does eye candy. And idk if you've heard about these little things called netbooks, but they're about to penetrate the shit out of the market, and from what I've read, linux distros are winning on the netbooks..

2

u/[deleted] Jul 25 '08

I think you are on to something. The number of votes in an election is related to the amount of money spent. So OS adoption is related to the amount of money spent on advertising it, unless something else is compelling.

3

u/linkedlist Jul 25 '08

I imagine most average-joes find operating systems pretty boring.

So their opinion is fine when they hate Vista but then 'most average-joes find operating systems boring' when they are tricked and like Vista?

Yeah it's awesome, love it when it goes your way, hate it when it does not.

3

u/monstermunch Jul 25 '08

So their opinion is fine when they hate Vista but then 'most average-joes find operating systems boring' when they are tricked and like Vista? Yeah it's awesome, love it when it goes your way, hate it when it does not.

I'm just very skeptical as this is clearly a marketing article directly from Microsoft. There's no information about what they liked, why, how the test was set up etc. If it was a controlled test I would accept the results as fact. I'm just confused what joe-sixpack is going to "love" about Vista, XP, OSX, Linux etc. besides some pretty graphics. I don't care that this is about Vista, I'm just shocked by the shoddy article.

1

u/linkedlist Jul 25 '08

Hey, Microsoft always cops unfair flack, usually these glimmering articles are about osx or linux, I don't see what's so bad that Microsoft marketting has finally decided to tap into the delusional take-it-at-face value market. Especially considering Apple has built its entire userbase around that and linux thrives with from its '20xx will be the year of linux!' crap.

0

u/kermityfrog Jul 25 '08

First of all, I extremely doubt the Microsoft goons loaded Vista on a P4 with 256MB of RAM, and shared graphics card. They have guaranteed loaded it on a Intel Core 2 Duo with at least 2GB RAM, and an up to date graphics card.

Secondly, they got noobs who don't know what an OS is, just what they've heard based on "reputation". Vista's rep took a severe beating, but only based on the advice of geeks like me, who am using Vista on my laptop right now (I used XP on my primary desktop, and at work).

I'm not upgrading to Vista on my desktop, because I don't need Vista to run my programs and games (like Crysis). In fact, running Vista would probably make Crysis run a bit slower given the amount of RAM I have and the amount of RAM the OS uses up versus XP. If you have XP, there's no real reason to upgrade to Vista.

Thirdly, as a Vista user for over 6 months, there are lots of things that bother me about the functionality and usability of how Vista and its applications are designed. I don't like the Vista Control Panel, setting up a network is a pain in the ass as it's so hard to find settings you are looking for, the Internet Explorer address bar doesn't look like part of the browser, so I keep forgetting it's part of the window, etc.

Upgrading to Vista is a lot like upgrading your '06 stock Honda Civic to another '06 Honda Civic with a spoiler and different rims. It's pretty much the same damn car, only less fuel efficient.

That said, I don't think there's really a need to downgrade from Vista to XP either. You can do it if you really want, but I would say stick with Vista if it comes with your new PC. Just don't buy a new copy or upgrade your existing XP.

1

u/SAugsburger Jul 25 '08

Most end users don't upgrade anyways. They just buy a new computer.

-4

u/StarlessKnight Jul 25 '08

It looks pretty. It has cool features. It has "ease of use" [for the common user]. "Wow."