Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Asimov System To Monitor Users' Machines In Real Time
SmartAboutThings writes Microsoft will monitor users in the new Windows 9 Operating System in order to determine how the new OS is used, thus decide what tweaks and changes are need to be made. During Windows 8 testing, Microsoft said that they had data showing Start Menu usage had dropped, but it seems that the tools they were using at the time weren't as evolved as the new 'Asimov' monitor. The new system is codenamed 'Asimov' and will provide a near real-time view of what is happening on users' machines. Rest assured, the data is going to be obscured and aggregated, but intelligible enough to allow Microsoft to get detailed insights into user interactions with the OS. Mary Jo Foley says that the system was originally built by the Xbox Team and now is being used by the Windows team. Users who will download the technical preview of Windows 9, which is said to get unveiled today, will become 'power users' who will utilize the platform in unique scenarios. This will help Microsoft identify any odd bugs ahead of the final release.
Even after axing 4000 employees and preeching a new leaf culture, Microsoft is still so divorced from its customer base that it requires an intrusive surveillance program to figure out how to deliver a functional product.
Here are some hints for free: listen to your customers and stop treating them like unwashed hobos. shutter your dismal app store, stop making the OS contingent upon capacitive touch screen, release one, one version of the OS instead of a whole shit sandwich of different versions the average user cares nothing about. bring back the start button. Quit trying to make me use your internet browser, its a wretched piece of garbage. Stop with the search engine, its alexa rank is ten fold lower than yahoo and its results are worse than awful.
Good people go to bed earlier.
From the article:
(Emphasis mine.)
Maybe I'm just out of it since I've never played Halo, but how is "Asmiov" a "Halo-influenced codename"? Doesn't this reference Isaac Asimov, the extremely prolific writer and one of the major pillars of classic science fiction? I'm assuming that something within Halo is named Asimov, after Isaac. Do we credit references to the latest to use the reference instead of the original source?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
During Windows 8 testing, Microsoft said that they had data showing Start Menu usage had dropped, but it seems that the tools they were using at the time weren't as evolved as the new 'Asimov' monitor.
No, Microsoft, wrong conclusion. See, your data told you the $deity's own truth, that start menu usage has dropped. Most people pretty much use desktop shortcuts 90% of the time, so your stupid fisher-price jolly candylike tiles may look like crap but don't seriously impact that specific usage pattern. More accurate data collection won't change that.
What your data didn't tell you? That remaining 10% of the time doesn't just mean people "forgot" they had a shortcut and decided to use the start menu for the fun of it. Using the start menu drastically beats having to hunt down actual executables somewhere on the HDD, particularly for administrative-type tasks that might go six folders deep into the Windows directory, and have insanely long command-line arguments as a bonus (ie, a lot of the control panel apps).
Data doesn't equal knowledge. The stats can tell you "how often", but not "why".
They appointed Cloud Guy to run the show, at a time when Cloud was a buzzword. No big surprise there from a trendy board/investor point of view, but to anyone with technical chops that move went against basically every major strength Microsoft had left and played straight to their weaknesses.
Based on historical trends, I suspect MS get 2-3 disasters with Nadella at the top before he gets forced out. The difference this time is that now Microsoft itself can probably only survive 2-3 more disasters on the Vista/Win8 scale before it ceases to be a major player in the industry at all.
The worrying thing is that there is no clear successor, with neither Linux nor OS X having the application base to be comprehensive competitors to desktop Windows yet, while the average web app is still a child's toy in comparison to serious software (and often a child's toy with serious security and privacy concerns). It is possible that the 2010s will be remembered as the decade when progress in software development reversed and the industry became dominated by cheap, "good enough" software that left professional/power users out in the cold, though I have some hope that OS X and the relatively polished, diverse and sometimes disruptive applications running on it will take over before all is lost.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm guessing they noticed the start menu usage drop right after they made pinning to the task bar easy enough -- that covers probably 80-90% usage for most people if they pin the right programs.
What's amazing is that they thought the start menu lost its worth just because it lost much of its usage.
The win8 start page ended up being more of a glorified taskbar than a glorified start menu, both due to the unintuitive search interface (no indication that you should just start typing -- and the actual search icon is a different search of course) and the flattened folder structure (ie: if a program installs 14 icons into MyCompany\MyProgram under the old start menu, it now is 14 icons pasted directly onto your start page in amongst the icons from every other program you've installed.)
Navigating the win7 Start menu was relatively easy and intuitive. Navigating the win8 start page is pretty much the opposite of that. Its only really "easy" if the only things you ever use are the preinstalled software/icons/links (since its also reasonably unintuitive how to organize the start page. Not that the old start menu was much better for that but the existence of the folder structure tended to keep it from getting so cluttered that you absolutely needed to organize it given that it wasn't something you had to search through too often usually.)
Basically, it sounds mostly like they looked at the raw numbers and made a decision without bothering to check the cause of the usage drop (and more importantly, whether the remaining use cases were still relevant.) You would think the countless amount of bitching from the first day of the announcement forward (and who knows how much internal bitching by their own staff who would almost certainly have been subjected to it first) would have tipped them off but I guess not. Oh well, at least they seem to have learned their lesson for the moment.