The BIG Kahuna

What is it? Microsoft researched 140 people by fooling them into believing they were evaluating a new operating system. One that would replace Vista, called the Mojave operating system.

Here’s what happened…they liked it. Then they were told that it was really Vista.

Brilliant huh?

Here’s some issues that I have with it. First, if you’re starving and stranded in the desert (like how I worked the Mojave thing in here)?any food will look good right? These people had pre-conceived issues with Vista (The average pre-demo score for Windows Vista was 4.4 out of 10), therefore they had bias when evaluating any “new” software. In other words, anything would have been better than Vista (because they hated Vista), even if their minds tricked them into thinking it wasn’t Vista.

The demographic is so small that the confidence level on this must be like 1%. I’m not a statistician but I do know that a confidence level of say over 85% is something to shoot for. Please, add your comments on this if you think I’m off.

Isn’t Microsoft basically saying our brand image of Vista really sucked? Is this the appropriate way to?change brand image? We use to suck but now we don’t (according to 140 people of the trillions that use Vista).

If Microsoft really wanted to do some real research they should have spent some real money and surveyed a much larger number. Read all the details here.

Here’s the scoop, changing a brand image is hard to do. Especially if you have no real brand identity to begin with.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 7:09 am and is filed under Branding News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.