Marcel Winatschek

Vista in a Trench Coat

Just when you think Microsoft has found the floor of their own embarrassment, they dig further. The Mojave Experiment rebranded Windows Vista as something called "Mojave," showed it to uninformed strangers off the street, filmed them saying nice things, then revealed the twist—see, people actually like Vista, they just don’t know it! The implicit logic being that if you disguise your product as something else and trick people into approving it, that counts as vindication.

It doesn’t. If your software is only well-received when nobody knows what it is, you don’t have a perception problem. You have a product problem. This was an elaborate monument to denial dressed up as a marketing campaign, and it deserved every bit of the mockery it got. I kept hoping Apple would make an ad about it.