NyquistRate

If you haven’t yet seen the advertisements for the “Mojave Experiment,” let me explain.

Microsoft launched a new advertising campaign, the goal of which is to dispel the negative preconceived notions people have about Windows Vista. Aside from whether or not Vista is truly better than the word of mouth beyond a 15 minute demo, they’ve managed to screw up the campaign in typical Microsoft fashion.

The campaign’s Web site, http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/, now shows users without Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in a message asking them to install it. I can’t seem to find any numbers on the Silverlight install base, but I’m confident that it’s low relative to the Flash Player install base, which was the plug-in used to display the site until recently.

Now, if you’re marketing a product that’s been rumored to be buggy, hard to use and downright annoying, would you send users to a Web site that asks them to install a relatively niche piece of software in order to learn about how great your product really is?

Unfortunately, it gets worse. When I clicked the link to skip to the “Non-Silverlight” version, I was greeted with the error below. The site, of course, required Windows Media Player. Not the best choice for Mac users, even though it’s more prevalent than Silverlight.

One of the big reasons people are using Flash video players all over the place is because Flash is so ubiquitous. It makes no sense for a marketing campaign such as this to ignore that fact simply for company synergy — it only hurts the cause. If you must use Silverlight and Windows Media player, at least write some code to auto-detect its presence, and fall back to Flash. I could live with a Flash-powered site that says, “Install Silverlight for a better experience.”

At any rate, here’s what I was trying to see, as hosted (in Flash) by Google’s YouTube: