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A quick refresher on Mojave: Mojave was the fake codename Microsoft assigned to Windows Vista when it recently conducted focus groups among consumers running Windows XP, Mac OSX and Linux. (Microsoft first discussed Mojave publicly last week, via News.com, so as to time it to coincide with its annual Financial Analyst Meeting festivities.) On July 29, Microsoft posted to the Web video footage from the Mojave interviews, showing how users’ feelings and attitudes about Vista changed once they actually got to see the product in action, rather than just hearing about it second-hand.

In the past few days, I’ve seen commentators claiming everything from Microsoft is trying to dupe consumers, to Microsoft purposefully didn’t discuss the enterprise versions of Vista because the company no longer cares about business users.

First things first: The Mojave Experiment is a marketing campaign. (But not part of the $300-million-plus campaign that still has yet to be unveiled around changing Vista’s and Microsoft’s perception among Apple-ad-inundated consumers.) The Mojave Experiment is not meant to trick users into buying Vista PCs. It isn’t Microsoft’s answer to the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC campaign.” It isn’t Microsoft trying to pretend that Vista is a flawless operating system that has gotten a bad rap for no reason. (In fact, Microsoft execs have been admitting publicly that they really screwed up with the original Vista release.)

The Mojave Experiment is simply a new way for Microsoft to acknowledge and try to combat the (well-earned) consumer perception problems it has made for itself around Vista.