This is how bad things have gotten for Microsoft Corp.: The software behemoth has a virtual monopoly in computer operating systems, and yet it still can’t get people to buy the latest version of its flagship product, Windows. In fact, things are so bleak for Windows Vista that customers have actually launched campaigns aimed at saving Vista’s stiffest competition -- the previous version of Windows, XP, which is now so old in technology years that it should qualify for Social Security. To Microsoft’s credit, the company knows it has a problem, and it has decided to address it directly with an ad campaign arguing that the product isn’t as bad as people think it is. To their detriment, they’ve fumbled that, too. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.) Microsoft A new campaign, called the "Mojave Experiment," shows a series of regular users who seem to like Windows Vista a lot -- as long as they don’t think it’s Windows Vista. Instead, the users have been told that they are seeing a demonstration of "Mojave," an even newer version of the operating system. The campaign also includes many of the negative things people have heard about Vista, to get a sense of why so many people think they won’t like it. The idea behind that is apparently to show that there is little context behind these suppositions. But here’s the problem: there’s also little context to this campaign. We don’t actually see much footage of people t ...
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This is how bad things have gotten for Microsoft Corp.: The software behemoth has a virtual monopoly in computer operating systems, and yet it still can’t get people to buy the latest version of its flagship product, Windows. In fact, things are so bleak for Windows Vista that customers have actually launched campaigns aimed at saving Vista’s stiffest competition -- the previous version of Windows, XP, which is now so old in technology years that it should qualify for Social Security. To Microsoft’s credit, the company knows it has a problem, and it has decided to address it directly with an ad campaign arguing that the product isn’t as bad as people think it is. To their detriment, they’ve fumbled that, too. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.) Microsoft A new campaign, called the "Mojave Experiment," shows a series of regular users who seem to like Windows Vista a lot -- as long as they don’t think it’s Windows Vista. Instead, the users have been told that they are seeing a demonstration of "Mojave," an even newer version of the operating system. The campaign also includes many of the negative things people have heard about Vista, to get a sense of why so many people think they won’t like it. The idea behind that is apparently to show that there is little context behind these suppositions. But here’s the problem: there’s also little context to this campaign. We don’t actually see much footage of people t ...