I first heard about the Mojave Experiment indirectly through Daniweb, whilst reading a blog post about something different. I also decided to check it out whilst reading through a thread on here. And I'm glad I did, if only so I could get to share my opinion on it. After viewing about two-fifths of the videos on the Mojave website, I had seen enough to post something back on the thread that ignited it all. And then I carried on watching videos, and I paused to put some more thoughts down. Those thoughts would have been reproduced word for word in this post, except that after I had gone through about three-fifths of the videos, my computer crashed. What an irony right? And this was the first time it had done in seven months. Which isn't so bad I think most Windows Users would agree, but was made worse for me by the fact that it did so, whilst I was viewing a website telling me about another Windows product. I'm using XP Pro SP2 by the way.
So what's the big deal? Windows OSs crash all the time (sorry but it's the truth). Maybe that was a sign from the gods that MS do have a point and the sooner I upgrade to Vista, the better my life will be, at least in terms of my computing experience. However I choose to be a little more skeptical than that. Not because I am part of the group of people who ignorantly jump on a bandwagon without looking at who and what's on it, but because quite simply, Vista hasn't quite worked for me.
I explained some of the ways in which this is true in the aforementioned thread, and I'll give a few others here. A friend of mine has a Dell Inspiron 6400, bought it early last year, with Vista on it. It has 1GB RAM, Intel Dual Core Processor, all in all pretty good setup. However it was (and still is he tells me) not great performance, ran slow, and therefore he doesn't run a lot of applications at once. Now I am of the opinion that Vista should only be sold with at least 2 GB of RAM, and with a processor speed of at least 2 Ghz per core because anything less and it will struggle. Infact some Vista computers that I've used, remind me of the Apple G4s that had the old OS Xs, with 256-512MB of RAM; or of XP workstations that are still sold with 512 MB RAM which in my opinion is a waste of time and is penny wise, pound foolish because sooner or later, that 512 MB of RAM will not be enough.
OK I know I've been quite negative up until now, and that's probably not fair because I have had some good experiences with Vista. Just yesterday morning, I was trying to find out why a clients laptop wouldn't connect to her LAN, and when I asked Vista to diagnose it, it gave me a clear reason (the DNS couldn't be pinged, if you're interested), and with that piece of information I was able to solve the problem in about 5 mins. With XP, it would have just told me that it couldn't get an IP Address, and I would have had to run several commands in the Command Prompt before arriving at the cause and solution. And that singular occurence made me feel safe - in the way that a 16 year-old knows his mum will scold him but will still come and pick him up if he gets detention for fighting at school. Hence I don't gripe about when I want to view or change something in the Control Panel and the OS double-checks to make sure that I meant to do that.
So Vista has it's good points - it's safer, a bit more intuitive so some tasks are easier, it has the potential for a lot more functionality, and matches the aesthetic pleasure that one might derive from using a Mac or watching someone use one. But it also has its downfalls - it tends to run slow (or at average speed, definitely not much faster than XP, but of course this depends on hardware configuration), support for some hardware and software is limited or improper, and I don't care what anyone says, but it takes getting used to.
Which brings me right back to the Mojave Experiment. I think it is definitely a good marketing idea from Microsoft, to expose people's blind ignorance which is never a good thing. But I don't buy into comments like "it's easy", and "it's fast", based on what I imagine is watching an expert, and an expert salesperson at that, perform tasks. It's a whole different ball game when you take it home and try to run your Media Editing software on it, or try to connect to work via VPN. As for whether or not it is down to the user, well if someone who has been using Windows OSs for 10 years can't pick up your new OS and get on with it immediately, is that the user's fault, or the software manufacturer's fault??
And this is what I am against, is what could almost be considered as false advertising. I believe it would be as bad for Microsoft to say Vista is the best thing to happen to me, as it is bad for people who haven't used Vista to tell me that it is rubbish. But for us folk in the middle, I think Microsoft should respect our ground and deal with us accordingly. Which I think they are doing slowly, but probably surely. And until I'm satisfied with the progress made, I will stick to my XP Professional thank you very much, because quite simply, it works for me.