Perception - the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information, according to Wikipedia. However, it seems people’s perceptions are too self reliant on hearing, rather than their experiences in terms of sight.

At this stage you must be asking yourself what this has to do with technology at all - and rightfully so. However, it seems that perception is one of the most important factors for a successful product in the technology world.

One prime example of this is Windows Vista, the newest version of the Microsoft Windows family. Some people say, including myself, that Vista is a revolutionary product that has a vast improvement over previous versions, including Windows XP. However, there are also some people who do not have the same feelings towards Vista.

Whilst I respect that everyone has different opinions, and that Vista is not for everyone, it gets on my nerves when people use other people’s opinions to judge the system themselves. I mean, I have been told so many times that Vista is “slow” or “shit”, however when I ask these people if they had used the program I usually get the response of “no”, or “not, but my friend did and they said it was not good.”

So, when I saw Microsoft’s experiment released earlier this week to see how people’s perception of Vista would change if they didn’t base their assumptions on what others thought, I laughed. It proved the point that people don’t seem confident enough to try the system out themselves – instead, they rely on other people’s thoughts or messages as to how they will judge the system.

The experiment consisted of getting a few people and asking them what they thought of Windows Vista. They all said responses like “slow”, “bad” and “I heard all this bad stuff about it”. The interviewers then told them that they were going to show them the new Windows operating system, named Mojave. They showed them the operating system and let them use it, then asked for their opinion. The responses were great, and all positive. However, they were stunned when the interviewers told them that they had in fact been using Windows Vista all along. To see their reactions were curious, and their responses were plain hilarious – “But…. why is it so fast” was one response, and another was that “[they’re] going to go out and buy it straight away”.

You can see the experiment yourself at www.mojaveexperiment.com.