Mojave Experiment is go

The Mojave Experiment is now live at https://www.mojaveexperiment.com/ and I love it.  As someone who launched Vista in the UK and evangelised, enthused and talked about it from day 1 I’ve had to deal with the whole perception vs. reality thing.  It’s been tough because the negativity and misinformation tends to spread like wildfire and dealing with that without support from a larger campaign that tells a better story means fighting an uphill battle.

Something that the videos highlight is the that the majority of people have not actually tried Vista and their negativity is based on second hand news.  This is something I’ve been talking about for a while now.  Here’s what I said back then:

“It also supports what I find talking to customers out there in the field - those who have a negative perception either tried Vista in the early days and had problems or haven't actually tried it and have based their upgrade policy based on what they hear or read in the press. To those people, I challenge them to have another look.”

If I sit down with anyone I can - without fail - show them things that will impress them in Windows Vista.  But I’m only one person.  Microsoft don’t do a good enough job telling the story at scale – hopefully that's something we can address this year.

Viral and I were talking about the whole perception problem last night over dinner: we spend lots of time talking about the “how” and the “what” when it comes to products and the company - but we don’t often get the “why” right.  This is a problem because the “why” is often the most crucial part – it’s what defines the company; goals, ethos and vision.  We need a “why” so we can agree or disagree with where a product or service is taking us – it’s something we can relate to and buy-in to.

Microsoft needs to remind people where it has come from, what it has achieved and where it is going every single day.  Back in the day, when the mission was to put “a PC on every desk and in every home”, it was a big answer to “why” Microsoft and what the company was striving for.  People could get what Microsoft was all about and since then, the company has achieved that goal and changed the course of history. 

Since then, our mission has to allow people to realise their full potential – it’s a good mission but Microsoft need to remind itself and it’s customers about it, and what it means.  This will help to answer that “why” question.  Things like the Mojave help to demonstrate “why” – but it needs scale, bring it on I say!