True, but misleading anyway

An unusually breathless report at Webmonkey is headlined "Blind Taste Test Shows XP Users Love Vista":

Microsoft took a play from beverage marketing this month with a blind taste taste of Windows Vista. Company researchers rounded up XP-loving Vista skeptics in San Francisco to try out what they claimed was a new operating system, which they code-named Mojave. After taking the OS for a spin, the guinea pigs were let in on the secret: they were drinking straight-off-the-shelf Windows Vista.

The taste-testers were overwhelmingly positive. Earlier this month Microsoft announced a plan to tell the "real Windows Vista story." Expect the footage from the not-so-hidden cameras to make its way into an ad campaign soon. No word on whether there were any Chris Farley-esque outtakes.

And why should this be a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention? The new Vista UI got pretty high marks from reviewers, and it apparently cleans up some less-than-great UI quirks from XP. Run on new (high-powered) equipment, there's no reason it shouldn't wow a sample audience who were brought in to test-drive a new Windows OS.

Well . . . of course!

This is not why people have been staying away from Vista — it's not the look and feel of the UI — it's that it'll almost certainly run like a constipated hippo on most people's existing machines! Few of us want to buy all-new equipment just to run a new OS. Especially if we'll need to buy faster/more capable machines just to get something like the same perceived performance as we currently get from our old XP-powered clunkers.