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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."
In other words, Firefox, Opera, XP, and Linux users. And the experiment will get turned off, once they switch back to IE8 on Vista.
Or falsify your user agent.
i think google already does this. i read about a ui designer who left google. he said that google relied too much on experimental data for their colors and ui than his advice. for example, if they had to choose the color of the search button in youtube, dark blue or light blue. so for a day, each color would be tried. due to the sheer volume of clicks, they would be able to see patterns and then decide which color users are more likely to click on.
but the key difference here is that changing ui is nowhere as prolematic as reducing speed.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Uh, doesn't all of MS's servers get fronted by Alkamai systems (running Linux) to distribute the load and help mitigate DDoS attacks?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
What a surprise, users are disrupted when they have to wait for a UI to respond.
Now if only they could inform the Visual Studio team, which keeps shipping crappy IDEs that take seconds to MINUTES to respond to certain operations.
Sure, it wouldn't be so absurd, because we all know that a Microsoft Live results page is just like a nice burger, or a nice frothy Guiness getting poured ever slowly. The slower it takes, the better it usually is.
In fact, that should be Microsoft new marketing campaign: "At Microsoft Live, we make all our results from scratch and we don't pre-index anything. It does take a little bit longer, and we may not be the biggest search engine around, but that's just a sign we're focusing on delivering quality results -- not fast results."
If we can sue them, then we also have to sue Comcast!
They frequently slow down my browsing with their cruddy filtering, to the point where some jumps take seconds.
This isn't right(since I'm Canadian), but tracert doesn't lie!
It's horrible when a game's servers have comcast lines between them and me. Rather than 50-150 ping, I face 700+. :(
When I was a teenager, I worked at McDonald's. One day, some corporate people came into the restaurant with stop watches and notebooks. They had people pulled from the cash registers, then had extra people put at the registers. It appeared that they were doing something along the lines of what you are saying and what Microsoft did.