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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."
(Ba da BOOM! Don't forget to tip your waitress.)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
oh wait...
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.
What is cool about the Web is that it is the most Agile of all release environments. Unlike shrinkwrap software, web software can be changed very easily and universally for all users. It brings a raw edge to the development of the software.
In this, there is also the possibility of becoming complacent and ill-tuned to the needs of your users. Taking Google as an example, they keep their services in a perpetual state of beta, always in testing, never reaching a final v1. This type of reliance on constant feedback from customers may work for a short while, but unless the product reaches a state of relative stability (in terms of both not crashing and also not changing) the users will typically find some other software to use.
So when Microsoft decides to impact a few customers with degraded QoS, they may be setting themselves up for a bigger fall later. By introducing the possibility that MS may actively sabotage your user experience in the name of experimentation and testing, they degrade their own reputation (as much as it can be degraded from its current levels) and needlessly increase FUD regarding their proffered services.
It may be for a good cause, but customers should not be the ones testing Microsoft's software. As a professional software house, they should provide good quality control before software hits the servers. It doesn't matter if this is the age of Agile or not.
" ... But if it helps me make a good, strong business argument to make other changes that will improve the experience for all of my users, for all time to come, and it means that a small segment of users for a small period of time will experience what we think will likely be a negative thing but we're not sure, it was a test worth running. ..."
If anyone in Government said the same thing, it would be a huge, unequivocal assault on freedom (where users = citizens; negative thing = anything you can't legally do to prisoners; and test worth running = ongoing study).
As a corporation, though, it's good to go.
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 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
Wait, Microsoft has a website? Since when?
I think they have been doing same with Vista.
Why go to the Microsoft home page?
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
> He also talks about what it's like to be one of the most often-targeted DDoS sites on the planet.
Microsoft.com is a DDoS site? I knew it! All this time they have secretly been DDoSing their competitors and customers alike to achieve world dominance.
A week or so ago I tried to download the Windows 7 RC. I tried to get the x64 and x32 version, both from within Firefox. 3.0 on Linux (x64 Ubuntu). Neither would actually start the download.
At the time, I was wondering if they were throttling or somehow inhibiting me from downloading, intentionally. The little spinning pie kept spinning, and nothing happened; no data was being sent or received, according to wireshark - it was just an irritating graphic to keep me occupied. Now I'm wondering again if it was intentional.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Passing on the low-hanging fruit, it seems to me that this is pretty much exactly the kind of thing that happens all the time at the packet layer. WRED, for example, selectively drops packets even when buffers aren't full and the network is still theoretically operating under capacity so that the next TCP connection doesn't bring down the uplink. How is the Microsoft strategy qualitatively different?
"Veteran Ill. sheriff accused of trafficking pot
By JIM SUHR
ST. LOUIS (AP) Sheriff Raymond M. Martin has been the law for nearly 20 years in a struggling southern Illinois county. But federal prosecutors say he's been breaking it lately by peddling pounds of pot, some seized by his own department, often in uniform and from his patrol vehicle.
Authorities on Monday led away a handcuffed Martin, 46, from his small Shawneetown office after his arrest on federal drug trafficking charges accusing him of supplying a dealer he threatened to kill when that man said he wanted out. The Gallatin County sheriff also allegedly pledged to use his authority to shut down rival drug traffickers.
"It's almost beyond belief," said Doug Maier, the sheriff in neighboring White County. Maier called Martin "a pretty low-key guy."
He continued, "Obviously, there was a different side that I've never observed."
Martin was jailed pending a Wednesday detention hearing on three counts of marijuana distribution and two counts of carrying a firearm, his service weapon, while trafficking drugs. He could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
A woman who answered his home telephone refused to comment, and Martin's court-appointed public defender did not immediately return messages.
Martin's job status was unclear Tuesday. Calls to Gallatin County Chairman Randy Drone rang unanswered, while calls to the sheriff's department rolled over to a neighboring dispatch center, which regularly answers calls when no deputies are in Martin's office. No one would say the exact size of Martin's department, other than to say it's small.
Martin's popularity in the county surrounding Shawneetown boasting little more than a courthouse, a couple of convenience stores and Rudy's barbecue restaurant swept the Democrat to re-election four times since he took office in 1990.
A criminal complaint accuses him of distributing more than two pounds of marijuana between April 27 and May 11. But an affidavit by Glenn Rountree, an investigator with the Drug Enforcement Administration, suggests Martin's dealings were many times that total.
In a blow-by-blow account painting a picture of a good cop gone bad, Rountree wrote that Martin hatched a marijuana-dealing scheme in November with the drug dealer who later got cold feet.
At that time, Martin handed the dealer, unidentified in court papers, two pounds of pot and asked if the man could "get rid of that" for the sheriff, who promised he'd use his power to protect him if he ever got caught selling. If the dealer didn't comply, Rountree wrote, Martin said he could "make up" a crime against him.
From then until early last month, Martin brought 1- or 2-pound amounts of marijuana on average once every couple of weeks to a rural, secluded meeting spot, Rountree wrote. But the sheriff twice brought 10 pounds and brought 20 pounds another time, according to the affidavit.
The meetings between the two were arranged by cell phone, with the dealer using vague code words Martin supplied to confuse possible eavesdroppers, including investigators, Rountree wrote.
The dealer grew unsettled over time and wanted out, but Martin would have none of that, Rountree wrote. At least twice, the sheriff pulled his service revolver and insisted emphatically to the dealer that making him "disappear" would be "that easy," according to the affidavit.
Rountree suggested the twitchy dealer went to investigators April 9. Over the next several weeks, authorities taped the dealer's conversations with Martin and tracked the sheriff's county-issued Ford Expedition.
At least once, Rountree alleged, the sheriff gave the informant marijuana seeds, saying he could pare his debt to the sheriff by growing pot plants for him.
And the sheriff dispensed advice, cautioning the man that it'd be "silly" for the dealer to get drunk or use pills
...the data moved to significance extremely quickly
How are they to judge what's significant? Looking at their OS, they haven't got a clue!
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.
In IE (I need IE for some corporate intranet and extranet apps), I have set my home page to 'about:blank' and even then it takes some time to load. I have no idea why IE insists on showing me the message 'Connecting...' while loading my blank homepage. Shouldn't it come up instantly?
a web page more useless than a blank page.
http://havenworks.com/
Thank you, and good night.
I don't know what it is (I still use Firefox 1.5 on an old Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) and /. is so slow that I hesitate to visit it. (There is always a busy script I have to stop, GoogleAds or something takes an eternity to load; not to speak about the FLASH adds... Unfortunately, RSS does not help as it is so full of advertizing that the text is difficult to find. I thing I will ditch Slashdot and digg elsewhere.
I'd rather an empty page than a .net trojan.
Anyway, a blank html page is quite meditative, in a zen sort of way. I think we need more of them.
Isn't this type of study best suited for a properly designed and executed "focus group." It's surely the more appropriate way to do user testing.
Experimenting with web site delays on live users is akin to inappropriately releasing an operating system before it's ready for prime time, and letting the users suffer by finding and reporting the bugs. Oh, wait...
(Also, I'm sure MS has enough sections to their web properties, and enough traffic, and enough existing delays, that they could analyze their existing data to determine where delays are distracting or frustrating users.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
It's become the Internets equivelant of Fox News. Accolades, comments and opinions are not based on ideas or content, they are instead based on the company suggesting them and the party line. It's just a fanboy echo-chamber hell bent on promoting an agenda, with the whole concept of discussing an idea or product based on merit being entirely alien.
It's possible that Jesus didn't say that because dying at 33 with no children, he didn't exactly pull that off himself!
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
...software... in ten years time computers will be ten times faster and programs will be ten times larger and it will take the user ten times longer to do anything.....
Whats the article really about, if not how to cook a frog and how to determine the rate of turning up the heat.
If I understand the activity carried out correctly, he is working to grasp where to work on the site to improve its impact and delivery. Deciding to prioritise one aspect over another based on hunch would be difficult, but by carrying out some trials the data collected can support the decision. I'm no Microsoft fan, but that doesn't mean everything that comes out of Redmond needs te be wrong :-).
or Straw Man
A lot of people do. It's the default in IE, so when users search with the browser, they get resuls through Live. I see it in the referral results for a web site I help run; we get a whole lot of hits from Live.
As Microsoft's Eric Schurman points out, the fastest-loading page of all is a blank one, but it's also the most useless.
So? The second fastest popular page is google.com and it is the most useful. I haven't RTFA but does he actually say that performance and utility are inversely related?
Are we really surprised, Microsoft never has the User in mind ever, they abstract way to much from the user. Preventing users from access to the code that runs the system is a bad, a really bad idea. A user should always be in control of the OS and Windows is designed in such a way the User has no Control.
So what's stopping them from doing the same at the OS level.
Maybe, like a year after buying a computer or installing the OS, they degrade the user experience enough for users to start thinking about buying new hardware. And doing so, selectively, for home users which do not have time or resources to fully investigate the matter.
Hmm, screwing customers to generate revenue... Microsoft would not do that, would they?
I feel degraded whenever that overfriendly MS Word paper clip Office Assistant pops up and asks me if I need help!
This isn't news. This is how it's done. Ignoring the fact that it's about degrading performance, split testing is designed to attempt to optimize one variable. Sometimes it's difficult to isolate said variable. In this case, microsoft spends inordinate amounts of time and money to keep a high volume site snappy and responsive. The question is: are they spending *too* much money. So, they are attempting to answer that question using ye-olde-standard split testing methods.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
You've got to be kidding! Have you ever looked at the internet?
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.
a blank page is NOT the most useless, one that side-tracks, confuses, mis-leads, etc is WORSE than useless.
If it:
1) Pisses people off
2) Hasn't been done with a computer before
3) Is self-evident
Then it's ripe for a M$ patent. They ought to just patent the pissing people off business process and be done with the whole damn thing!