“The Mojave Experiment” goes public
As has been posted here earlier, Microsoft recently conducted an experiment in which they gave Vista naysayers an opportunity to be the very first to test drive “Mojave”, the new operating system from the software giant. In a nutshell, people who were vocal about hating Vista but had never tried it for themselves were brought in and asked why they wouldn’t upgrade to Vista, with the near-universal response being “I’ve just heard bad things about it”. Then, after praising Mojave on the highest mountain, it was revealed that these people were in fact using Vista, and the cameras were rolling to catch the stunned reactions.
The whole endeavour was dubbed “The Mojave Experiment”, and can be seen for yourself here.
This marketing ploy is hardly new…anyone of a certain age will remember the Folger’s Coffee Crystals ads from the late 80s (and the classic Chris Farley spoof on Saturday Night Live), but damn if it ain’t an effective one. I mean, what better way to prove the benefits of a product than by showing its greatest opponents that their perceptions about it were wrong about it all along? Especially when your greatest opponents have never even used the product in question?
As with pretty much all marketing initiatives, the press release regarding the focus group’s reaction to Mojave was laden with the usual dose of hyperbole. For instance, the mention of one participant’s exclamation of “OH, WOOOOOOOWWWW” came from her reaction to the product PACKAGE when it was handed to her. Still, a sound bite is a sound bite.
Turns out that, according to a recent Forrester survey authored by Mr. Thomas Mendel, “of 50,000 enterprise users, over 87 percent were still using Windows XP.” He goes on to compare Vista to “New Coke”, which is, as we all know, the great failed experiment of the 80’s (or the greatest marketing ploy of all time). Some of the insights made in the report are very interesting, while others are just plain obvious, like this gem:
“The rate of adoption of Vista remains twice that of Mac OS X. That’s not surprising since Vista is the natural follow-on to XP while companies would have to make a major commitment to switch to a new OS like Mac OS X.”
Well, yeah. I find it highly unlikely that OS X will ever replace Windows as an enterprise solution, if for no other reason than the fact that Winboxes can be purchased for a fraction of the cost of an Apple machine. Beyond that, “More than twice” is a fairly conservative estimate, with some claims being that the Vista adoption rate is “10 Times that of OSX” (though I would hardly call that a non-biased source). Regardless, Vista has hardly been a success, with Mr. Mendel’s report claiming that only 8.8% of users surveyed were using Vista, now 18 months old. By contrast, OS X users who have migrated from Tiger to Leopard represent 32% of Apple’s base, so while they may hold a much smaller share of the OS market, their users are definitely more willing to trust the new OS enough to install it.
The ad agency charged with making Microsoft cool again is Crispin Porter + Bogusky, helmed by ad-world mini-celebrity (and personal hero) Alex Bogusky. Whether the Mojave Experiment was the work of Mr. Bogusky is unclear (no one’s copped to it yet), but it certainly has his DNA all over it; Bogusky is the man who brought us recent classics like the Burger King Subservient Chicken and the Burger King Whopper Freakout. Now, he’s been handed the reins to guide Microsoft back into the hip culture club, and he’s been given a budget twice that of the Transformers movie with which to do it.
That’s right. Microsoft is committed to spending $300 million on marketing to get back into the hearts and minds of the youth. That’s roughly 6,667,000 Vista Home upgrades.
The Mojave Experiment may or may not be a CP+B project, but regardless, it is definitely just the beginning of what is sure to be a media onslaught which will be attacking your senses by (probably) early September 08.
Whether you’re a Mac person, a Windows person, or even a Linux person, will dictate how you react to the news that Microsoft is finally starting to make inroads to the youth market, and whether or not you personally see this as a good thing or a bad thing. But there is one thing this news bears that we can all likely be happy about: if Microsoft is going after Apple’s core market, Apple will surely have to fire back with something refreshing and new, which will almost certainly mean the death of the increasingly irritating “Mac and PC” guys.
As the campaign says, we will have to see for ourselves.
The Mojave Experiment can be seen here.
