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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. . . .
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.
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.
You just disproved your own point.
So you ping and then you sleep()? Not much of a flood ping really...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Yep. Half a second delay is the end of the world. Age of Linux as SaaS...or whatever buzzwords are in play here.
I'm up for a good Microsoft rant any time, any place, but 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? You can't really beta test this stuff. You can try running simulations, but nothing beats real world numbers.
Would we view this any different if Apple tried it? Google?
(Disclaimer: This is a logic exercise. In reality, I doubt there's actually much MS could and would do to their site to improve my experience using it.)
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
Yeah! I mean, take IE6 for example. That didn't change in a REALLY long time, and lots of people use it! That makes it good, right? [/sarcasm]
Your statement neglects quality. Yes, people want sites that're stable and don't crash, and yes, changing the design every week is bad and confusing, but improving on the design and function of a site is always a good thing, so long as you do so at intervals large enough for users to adjust to. The design of Gmail has only changed drastically two or three times in it's history design-wise, but they still consider it a Beta (depending on what you consider a drastic change, of course).
The issue is that Google, once simply a search engine, is now in the Web Services industry. The fact is, no matter what the label says, Gmail and many of their other apps are not in Beta, and haven't been in a long time. They're just hesitant to call it "v1" or something because that has a sense of finality, like customers shouldn't expect it to change very often. With the web, and Web Apps in particular, that's no longer really the case. They are often redesigned and redone to improve their performance, effectiveness, ease-of-use, and even aesthetics. You even point out yourself how agile the web is as an environment for releasing software. You neglect, though, that this keeps it interesting for the users as well, because they like the feeling that their product is continually being improved at no extra cost to them (unlike many shrink-wrapped software) (Note: When I say "extra cost," I mean in addition to any subscriptions they already have to the service, if any).
The "Beta" in Google's case is very much a marketing issue as much as it is a technical issue.
There's no L in Akamai, but yes, Akamai mirrors the static content, such as images. However, dynamic content such as search results are still served by Microsoft.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I always thought that was Spock.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
a web page more useless than a blank page.
http://havenworks.com/
Thank you, and good night.
"The "Beta" in Google's case is very much a marketing issue as much as it is a technical issue"
And perhaps a commitment issue, like people who stay engaged forever but never actually get married...
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
So you ping and then you sleep()?
TODO: Insert geek related sex-joke here