The "Mojave Experiment" raised eyebrows last week, when it was first disclosed by Ina Fried at Cnet and then outlined during Microsoft's fiancial analyst meeting.

Microsoft basically did a blind taste test, like the old Pepsi-Coke ads, with a bunch of Vista haters and skeptics in San Francisco and recorded the results. They were shown software that was described as Microsoft's next operating system, but actually it was Vista, and they mostly loved it.

The videos are finally public today at MojaveExperiment.com, a nifty Web site where you can zoom around and choose different clips.

More details of the experiment were also posted at the Vista team blog (at 1:09 a.m.?). Excerpts:

"We did not use some geeked out or custom built PC. We used an HP Pavilion DV2500. It had 2GB of RAM and was running an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz. The OS was a 32 bit version of Windows Vista Ultimate."

"Of the 120 respondents polled, on a scale of 1:10 where 10 was the highest rating, the average pre-rating for Windows Vista was 4.4. After they saw the demo, respondents rated Mojave an average of 8.5."