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."

Comments

Re:Punch your customers in the face, selectively

[Facegarden]

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?

That's just fucking ridiculous. Do you really feel similarly violated when a page loads 500mS slower versus someone punching you in the face?

If so, then wake the fuck up. It's a pretty interesting problem to determine how fast is "fast enough" for a page to load and I don't blame them.

Imagine google.com could load ten times faster than it currently does, but would increase their operating costs by ten times. I would bet that no one suggests that it would be worth it, so why is it so unreasonable to investigate the opposite?

Think before you type. You may be modded funny, but to me, that's only because there isn't a "douchebag" mod.
-Taylor

Re:As opposed to ...

[Caledfwlch]

and by extension as Microsoft apps are so big and bloated taking so long to load, are bug prone, and not as integrated as they pretend, causing work on a task to take longer... all we need to do is outlaw Microsoft products and everything will be dandy! Of course the power companies will complain because power use will decline.

Re:As opposed to ...

[slazzy]

If you think that's bad you should try Vista...