Microsoft looks to Mojave to revive Vistas image
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After months of searching for ways to defend its oft-maligned Windows operating system, Microsoft may just have found its best weapon: Vista's skeptics.
Spurred by an e-mail from someone deep in the marketing ranks, Microsoft last week traveled to San Francisco, rounding up Windows XP users who had negative impressions of Vista. The subjects were put on video, asked about their Vista impressions, and then shown a "new" operating system, code-named Mojave. More than 90 percent gave positive feedback on what they saw. Then they were told that "Mojave" was actually Windows Vista.
"Oh wow," said one user, eliciting exactly the exclamation that Microsoft had hoped to garner when it first released the operating system more than 18 months ago. Instead, the operating system got mixed reviews and criticisms for its lack of compatibility and other headaches.
To be sure, the focus groups didn't have to install Vista or hook it up to their existing home network. Still, the emotional appeal of the "everyman" trying Vista and liking it clearly packs an emotional punch, something the company has desperately needed. Microsoft is still trying to figure out just how it will use the Mojave footage in its marketing, though it will clearly have a place.
The Mojave project is likely to be just one of many efforts designed to resuscitate Vista's image as well as lend strength to the Windows platform among stepped-up competition from Apple and Google. In an interview Wednesday, Windows unit business chief Bill Veghte told CNET News that he wants to see his unit try new things to get the message across.
"We have a huge perception opportunity," he said, offering a glass half-full assessment of things. "We are going to try a bunch of stuff."
The image improvement effort, known internally as FTP, has many components. Well-publicized are the hundreds of millions that Microsoft plans to spend on a broad campaign buttressed by edgy ads from Crispin Porter and Bogusky. But Veghte wants the company pushing on multiple marketing fronts.
With small businesses, for example, Microsoft earlier this month launched the "Assurance" campaign. In that effort, Microsoft is offering free Vista-related technical support, a move that will add millions of dollars to Microsoft's telephone support costs. The point, Veghte said, is that businesses want to see Microsoft standing behind its product.
Veghte is convinced, like others at Microsoft, that despite early technical challenges, Vista's problems are primarily ones of perception.
Much of that perception, Microsoft belatedly acknowledges, stems from Apple's successful and unchallenged anti-Vista campaign. But, after stewing over the ads on many of his morning runs, Veghte decided that it was time to strike back, even without a new version of Windows to tout. Apple, he said, has "crossed a line" from fact into fiction.
