Wednesday, July 30, 2008

The Mojave Experiment: Fake Results?

Last week, Micro$oft gave the results of an interesting experiment. They tricked 120 diehard XP users into testing a "new" version of windows codenamed Mojave then asked for their opinions. Of course, there was no such version, it was just Vista SP1 with a new theme. According to Micro$oft, over 90% of them where impressed with what they saw, even citing the reaction of one of the test subjects as "oh, wow!". Of course, and faster than people could blog about it, Micro$oft created a website for it, as a marketing move, no doubt. But after taking a look at it, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes made an interesting discovery:
At first blush, I think that you’re supposed to believe that you’re being presented with the views of all the participants, but when you actually count the screens, you see that there are only 55 on offer. OK, 55 out of 120/140, not bad... but...
...
Once you eliminate the montages and people who appear in more than one clip, you end up with 35 participants who actually appear on screen [...] Given a pool of over 100 participants, I would have expected to have seen more faces, and definitely no duplicates. The way it looks to me is that Microsoft had a hard time filling the 55 available spaces with good commentary about Vista.
Funny, eh? Make your own conclusions, but my guess is that Micro$oft's PR people are, as usual, lying to us.

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