So Microsoft has a new “viral” site out that hopes to dispel the myths around Windows Vista. They conducted several focus groups and asked participants their opinion about Windows Vista of which most were negative. Then they showed the participants the new Microsoft OS called “Mojave”. They see, and love the new version.

For full disclosure, I upgraded to Vista and have several likes and dislikes but overall am happy with the upgrade. But I’m more interested in the psychology at play.

There are several factors influencing the perceptions of the participants:

Negative press and full assault from Apple from day one.
The launch of Vista seemed to be mismanaged from the start. I remember the lines at the store when Windows 95 came out. This was nothing like that.

Past experience using Windows products (good or bad)
Windows has been such a strong part of our day-to-day lives. We expect really big things from upgrades.

The luxury of having someone explain all the new features to them
This is a big one. Users rarely every dig through documentation to figure out how all the features work. They slowly learn only the ones that are relevant to them.

The opportunity to see a “new product” before anyone else
Users who are asked to participate in “new” designs are more optimistic than those who are asked to provide feedback on a product they already know.

Overall I think it’s a great case study on perception versus reality.

One last point of criticism for Microsoft: If you are building a product called SilverLight to go head to head with Flash why in the world would you put this together in Flash?

Update: Looks like the whole project has been upgraded to use SilverLight.

According to several sources the mirror has been around since the 13th century (give or take). Just about everyone is familiar with it. You know, that shinny thing that looks back at you in the bathroom.

But leave it to the product designers at LG to turn it into a “feature”. I think we’ve officially run out of new features for the phone.

See commercial below:

Now if you’re really into cutting edge check out the Jitterbug:

Imagine that. All it does is make calls and keep track of your contacts! No games, no facebook, oh yea and no mirror.

So I’ve been playing this game with my blog. Trying to climb my way to the top of Google for the search “Sean Landry“. I was getting there, a little more SEO and I would be there right…Wrong!

I dropped off the Google listings completely. I flipped page after page and still no seanlandry.com listed. Huh weird. So I did a search which would definitely bring my site up. I typed “seanlandry.com” And it came up #1. Great right? Not.

Here’s what I saw:

YIKES! What is all that text underneath my site? I went to my blog and everything looked fine. I couldn’t figure it out. So I looked at what Google webbot sees using the Google Webmaster tools and the first 50 keywords for my site looked like this:

1. alcohol
2. credit
3. marijuana
4. loan
5. card
6. effects
7. ringtone
8. drug
9. cocaine
10. phentermine
11. ringtones
12. prescription
13. viagra
14. debt
15. instant
16. cards
17. score
18. generic
19. steroids
20. approval
21. student
22. tylenol
23. tramadol
24. nicotine
25. reporting
26. cialis
27. ortho
28. testosterone
29. vicodin
30. adderall
31. hydrocodone
32. xanax
33. zoloft
34. blood
35. prednisone
36. soma
37. ambien
38. canada
39. pharmacy
40. effexor
41. equity
42. application
43. heroin
44. lipitor
45. mortgage
46. wellbutrin
47. abuse
48. mp3
49. acid
50. interaction

So I looked at the source of my pages. And there it was. Several HUNDRED lines of code all right before the end of the page. All using the display: none CSS to hide it from me but not from the crawler.

Now I’m in the process of changing passwords, updating my site’s index and locking everything down. Nothing worse than a SPAMer/Hacker to ruin my day.