Blog Posts Poke Holes in 'Taste Test' by Microsoft

SAN FRANCISCO Deserved or not, the Windows Vista operating system from Microsoft gets a bad rap. But the company's recent effort to repair Vista's reputation did not win any rave reviews either.

Last week Microsoft posted videos at MojaveExperiment.com of a test involving about 140 randomly chosen computer users who had low opinions of Vista. These users had no experience with it, so they were shown what was said to be the company's new operating system, called "Mojave." In nearly all the cases, they liked what they saw.

At the end, they were told that "Mojave" was really Vista.

The videos show the shocked reaction. "Wow, really?" many of them said, looking just as surprised as the patrons of America's finest restaurants did in the 1980s TV commercials when the brewed coffee had been replaced by "dark, sparkling, decaffeinated Folgers Crystals."

On the Web, however, many technology bloggers had a different reaction. "Microsoft thinks you're stupid" was the heading of a blog entry on the site of the Canadian magazine Maclean's. The blogger, Colin Campbell, wrote that "Microsoft seems to be shifting blame for its bad P.R. problems over to their customers."

Like the Folgers campaign, the Mojave Experiment is "a clever test that demonstrates nothing," said Bob Garfield, a columnist for Advertising Age magazine and host of "On the Media" on NPR.

If a product has a bad reputation, it is not because of faulty perceptions, Mr. Garfield said. It is because of a faulty product. Vista, halfway through its planned three-year life cycle, has drawn more scorn than most major software products do. People have found it hard to set up. Users have complained that it saps memory and that installing drivers or applications is too difficult.

Microsoft executives have been telling reporters in recent weeks of how much Vista has improved. The company says that with 140 million copies sold, it is Microsoft's fastest-selling operating system. According to Microsoft's internal research, 89 percent of users say they are "very satisfied" or "somewhat satisfied" with the product. Nevertheless, many bloggers had problems with how the Mojave Experiment was conducted. The main complaint was: is 10 minutes of watching an expert demonstrate Vista a valid basis on which to assess it?

One problem with the videos is that many of Vista's glitches have involved setting it up and installing drivers and applications. But in the Mojave Experiment, the software was preloaded, so that aspect of Vista was not tested at all. The site showed "no videos of connecting new devices, attempting to get on a Wi-Fi network, or tunneling into work's V.P.N.," or virtual private network, noted Adam DuVander of Webmonkey, a developers' site.

All these complaints are based on misunderstandings of the Mojave Experiment's purpose, said Ben Carlson, the chief strategy officer for Bradley and Montgomery, the branding firm that conducted the experiment. "It's not about saying Vista is perfect, or that all these people fell in love with it," he said. It was meant to show that "what people have heard about Vista is different from the reality."

The 10-minute demonstration was "a fair representation of the operating system," he said, though he did agree that "an operating system is something you live with." He also said the videos were not the end of the story. "A lot of what people have complained about will be addressed as it evolves," he said. "The experiment will continue."

Microsoft itself declined to comment.