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Suspicious Vista detractors were the target of an OS mind-trick, Microsoft grabbed a handful of people who had only heard about Vista and subjected them to the "Mojave Experiment."

It doesn't involve probes or Area 51 or shock treatment. The Mojave Experiment involves a simple switcharoo scheme where Vista is replaced by Microsoft's "new" new operating system, called Mojave. You can probably see where this is going already: Mojave is a trick; it's still Vista.

At the Windows Vista Blog, Chris Flores writes about Microsoft's concern about the gap between Vista perception and Vista reality. Their hunch was that people would like Vista if they got to know it and that they only thought they hated it, likely because everybody told them it sucked.

So, Microsoft pull aside 120 respondents who used other operating systems like Linux, or OSX, or were still stuck on XP, asked them what they thought about Vista. The video shows reviews weren't very good, and when asked to rate the system on a scale of one to ten, these same people who'd never used it before rated Vista an average of 4.4.

Not so hot.

Then, using a regular old HP Pavilion DV2500 with 2GB of RAM and Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz, a salesperson gave them a guided demo of the brand new Microsoft Mojave operating system. After being shown why it rocked, respondents rated the new system 8.5, thus "proving" anybody who doesn't like Vista is a technosheep and just full of it.

Maybe, like with H&R Block, Microsoft can set up Vista/Mojave outposts with more trained salespeople to demonstrate to the skeptics why Vista's not as bad as they think it is.