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How Microsoft Degrades Their Users (In a Good Cause)

Posted by kdawson on from the whoa-there-nelly dept.

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."

13 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. As opposed to ... by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 5, Funny

    In cases where we were giving what was a significantly degraded experience ...

    ... the normally degraded experience.
    (Ba da BOOM! Don't forget to tip your waitress.)

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    1. Re:As opposed to ... by zxjio · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Experimenting by delaying a pageload for 500ms is worthy of ethical considerations? Would you like to sue Microsoft for emotional damage? Too many people are afraid of doing anything these days.

    2. Re:As opposed to ... by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Informative

      Gmail does "selective degradation" really well. E.g. if you load gmail over a slow VPN over wireless connection it says "This site is taking longer to load than normal, would you like to try the Basic Html version or wait longer". Also you can choose basic html (i.e. less ajax and css) as your default view.

      Basic HTML is quite usable these days - it even does email address autocompletion on Opera. So it can use ajax but it presumably doesn't depend of it. In a way it's a bit like a well written application which can use new features if they are present but run without them on downlevel systems.

      --
      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;
    3. Re:As opposed to ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You're discussing the wrong topic. "graceful degradation" != "selective worsening".

      In Gmail, the degradation is helping you cope with a poor connection. In Microsoft's experiment, the degradation is hurting you and is imposed by a coin flip.

    4. Re:As opposed to ... by Jurily · · Score: 5, Funny

      Experimenting by delaying a pageload for 500ms is worthy of ethical considerations?

      No, they should be shot on sight.

    5. Re:As opposed to ... by EvanED · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That would probably completely invalidate the results though, for two reasons. First, the sorts of people who would opt into that wouldn't at all be representative. (It would take an unusual person to even find the opt-in, let alone volunteer for a degraded experience knowingly.) Second, knowing about it would be way too likely to affect how the people behaved.

      You could get halfway by saying "would you like to help us do research" or something like that, without saying in what way, which would reduce these problems, but not completely.

    6. Re:As opposed to ... by Jesus_666 · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's half a second! Let's do the numbers:

      We assume that Live search gets ten billion hits a day. We also assume that Microsoft degraded 5% of all hits. Thus Microsoft has wasted 1000000000 * 0.5s * 0.02 = ten million seconds! Microsoft wastes more than 26 years worth of productive time per day. Now, assuming that the computer of the Live search users consume 800W on average, we find that Microsoft wastes a whopping 20.9 watt-millenia per day. Assuming that 80% of that is turned into waste heat it's obvious that this has a non-negligible impact on Earth.

      Gentlemen, I think we have found the root cause for both the energy crisis and global warming (and because our bitching about the oil price annoys the arabic world, also islamic terrorism). Now all we need to do is keep Microsoft from doing these experiments and everything's dandy again.

      --
      USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
    7. Re:As opposed to ... by tannsi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think this would only actually be a problem if anyone used LIVE search.

  2. Select groups of users by mysidia · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Select groups of users by perryizgr8 · · Score: 5, Funny

      no, he did not forget. they are just too insignificant to talk about.

      --
      Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
  3. Re:Agile and all that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Punch your customers in the face, selectively by syousef · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Punch your customers in the face, selectively by nEoN+nOoDlE · · Score: 5, Funny

      Hey, who invited the logic guy to this Microsoft bashing thread?

      --
      Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.