The Mojave Experiment

The Mojave Experiment, aka Project Mojave, aka Microsoft’s new Vista marketing campaign, has been live on the web for a little while now, but as Microsoft has taken the campaign to TV I thought I may as well take this opportunity to weigh in.

In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I’m no Microsoft fan. I have used Windows for many years and I even have an Xbox 360. So I’m not a full-on hater by any stretch, but if the scale ranges from lover to hater I’m probably closer to the latter.

So, The Mojave Experiment. I think that, from a marketing perspective, Microsoft is missing the mark here in a pretty big way, in a way that is very typically Microsoft. As I see it the tenets of Microsoft marketing are as follows:

1) We (Microsoft) are the best.
2) If you (consumer) disagree with #1 then you are stupid.
3) You don’t want to be stupid do you?

The Mojave Experiment is a great example of this strategy. The assumption of the experiments is that Vista is fantastic and the only reason people don’t agree is that they are too dumb to understand how great it really is.

So they take a bunch of “real” consumers, all of which hate Vista for no apparent reason since none of them have seen it, and demo Vista form them – except they tell them it’s not Vista but a new version called Mojave. Naturally their minds are all blown by Vista’s sheer awesomeness and they all plan to go buy whichever of the 37 versions of Vista is right for them.

Here are, as I see it, the two main problems with this “experiment”.

1) Microsoft is admitting that people hate Vista. Many consumers probably don’t know much of anything about Vista, but now they will know that for some reason basically everyone hates it. Regardless of the fact that everyone ends up a convert in the end people are savvy enough to understand that Microsoft isn’t running this campaign for no reason. It smells of desperation and that generally doesn’t make people excited about a product.

2) Microsoft completely fails to address the reason that people don’t want Vista – their computers can’t run it because it is such a resource hog, it doesn’t work with peripherals – practical things like that. They just show features largely borrowed from OS X and talk about how great they are.

Maybe the Seinfeld campaign will be better. I’m not holding my breath.

UPDATE: Looks like I wasn’t far off about the Seinfeld campaign. I don’t think it’s even two weeks old yet and Microsoft has cancelled it.