'Mojave Experiment' Isn't Needed, More RAM Is
In a takeoff of the "blind taste tests" from the '80s, Microsoft videotapes a bunch of people -- seemingly from off the street -- and lets them view a PC operating system thinking its named "Mojave." When they rave about it, the Microsoft folks tell them it's actually visit. Surprise!
The point Microsoft is trying to make is that the more you know about Vista, the more you will like it.
The reality is that it's not about the market getting a better understanding of Vista. The reality is the market just needs a lot more RAM to make it work well. The market's experiences with Vista, for the most part, have been on dual-core PCs running one or two GB of RAM. That's like driving a performance vehicle on a bumpy dirt road. Uphill. In the rain. In reverse.
Since Day 1, Microsoft has downplayed the hardware requirements for Vista -- to this day even listing its minimum requirement as 1 GB of memory and a system with a CPU with a 1 GHz clockspeed. While tech professionals will roll their eyes and say, "of course that's the minimum requirement, but only a fool would use that," not everybody is a tech professional. People and businesses on budgets often have a way of trying to make due with minimum requirements.
(Although, Kevin Hoffman, who writes at the .NET Addict's Blog, contributed a couple of chucklers by saying that the " 'Mojave Experiment' participant selection committee was probably borrowed from the Jerry Springer show" and, "They must have tried VERY hard to find that many computer illiterate people.")
It would be interesting to know whether Microsoft presented Vista to its Mojave audience with PCs running the OS's minimum hardware requirements.
In the Test Center lab, last week we built a PC with standard components -- but spec'd it out with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 and 4 GB of DDR2 RAM at 800 MHz. It scored 4326 on Primate Labs' Geekbench 2.0 benchmarking software. It's not surprising that's about double the score of systems with dual-core CPUs and 2 GB of RAM that run Vista. But forget the numbers. What's surprising is the human experience with Vista on a system with that horsepower.
The quad-core PC boots in about 30 seconds, can simultaneously handle Skype calls and other office tasks and run an anti-virus scan in the background with no noticeable performance degradation.
But remember, systems with that kind of hardware weren't available to the masses when Vista launched a year and a half ago.
So for Microsoft to say to PC makers, system builders, resellers and users, "Hey, Vista is great if you're using a $1,600 desktop but only so-so at best if you're using a $600 one" isn't going to fly. Instead they're fighting back with the Mojave Experiment.
Just remember, without the extra RAM and CPU capacity, Vista is much more likely to leave you high and dry.