Programming Windows: The Mojave Experiment (Premium)

In 2006, Apple started a TV advertising campaign called “Get a Mac” that pitted hapless and fat John Hodgman (“I’m a PC”) against cool hipster Justin Long (“I’m a Mac”). The ads were usually quite funny, though they frequently engaged in exaggeration and even outright falsehoods to make the PC look worse than it was. But the campaign reached new heights when they turned to attacking Longhorn and then Windows Vista. And despite many calls for Microsoft to respond to the one-sided campaign, the software giant remained silent for years.

I was among the most vocal of those asking---and eventually begging---for Microsoft to defend itself. And then, incredibly, it finally did. In 2008, just ahead of the Windows 7 reveal at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008, Microsoft began its own advertising campaign called the Mojave Experiment. The ads detailed how Microsoft had case studies with consumers about their perceptions of Windows Vista, which were universally negative. And then they showed these same consumers getting a sneak peek at the next version of Windows, then codenamed Mojave, that would fix all of Vista’s problems. And universally, these same consumers loved Mojave.

The catch was that Mojave was not a new version of Windows. It was just Windows Vista. And the point, so elegantly detailed by the various ads, was that perception didn’t always match reality, making them the perfect response to Apple’s "Get a Mac" ads. Apple had preyed on and exaggerated that perception, and it had gotten away with it for years.

Here’s an interview I had with David Webster, the General Manager for Brand and Marketing Strategy at Microsoft, in August 2008 about the Mojave Experiment.

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"Not surprisingly, as a marketer at Microsoft, we toss around ideas for sport during the day and try to figure out what's been most effective at breaking through the noise," he told me. "We try to tell the story about the products we have and represent them in the best possible way. Windows Vista is one of those products where we think it's great, and we know that our customers do too. But every day we see noise out there that doesn't seem to correlate with reality. And we've been discussing and debating how to turn it around."

"First, and most important, Windows Vista is a solid release," he said. "As far as which tactics to employ in telling that story, we concluded that breaking through the noise, 15 to 16 months after it launched, would not be easy. People have already settled into a groove about the conventional wisdom, what it is, what it isn't. So we knew we had to do something disruptive."

"We spend a lot of time looking at data," he added. "What struck me was that we have solid statistical numbers showing that the more people use Windows Vista, the more they like it. Also, we've noticed that people who have adopted Windows Vista more recently like it even better than those who did so over a year ago. Famil...