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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.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.
More like the Orwell system, or perhaps the Huxley system...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
in the same paragraph. That'll be five laps. Backwards.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Prior to Windows 8, what exactly where people using to start applications if they were not using the start menu?
Or did they just notice the start menu was being used less often because people were keeping applications open?
90% of the people I see using windows have the desktop covered with icons to launch everything.
This is probably true, but it also illustrates the problem with Microsoft removing the Start Menu.
Removing the Start Menu provides zero benefit to the people who don't use it (they don't use it so they don't care if it's gone and removing it has no effect on how they do things) and makes things more difficult for the people who do use it.
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".
I've been using a desktop for more than 15 years.
I didn't read the rest of it. I've been using a desktop since Moby Dick was a minnow (ca. 1978) and I don't care to be schooled by a noob.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The problem was that most moderately tech savvy people decline to share telemetry data. So the data they were using to make decisions was already heavily skewed toward the barely computer literate crowd.
This is a classic problem with data analysis. You have to be sure you have a truly representative sample. It's astonishing that they made this simple mistake and made such a huge change without doing more analysis.
Disclosure:
I work extensively with Microsoft customer usage data (although on Visual Studio, not Windows)
Odds are, unless you've been very intentional about ticking the checkboxes the right way, Microsoft is already collecting usage data from you -- for a variety of products. Never without your consent, of course.
The issues around anonymizing your data and removing PII are taken very seriously. It's damn frustrating, because I often look over the data for user 234209342349 and think, "I wish I could email this guy and ask why the hell he is doing that". But there is no way for me to recover PII for VS client customers.
For the Visual Studio products, a typical approach is that data that might have a PII impact is one-way hashed on your local machine, so that PII never goes over the wire and never gets to Microsoft to begin with.
You can use tools like filemon to see where VS dumps the usage data files it generates. I don't remember if these look like binary mess on disk or not, but they get written to disk, and then you can see them go over the wire some time later. You could of course use a packet sniffer to see the on-the-wire format, and if it differs from what is stored on disk.
The data we scrub in VS covers the obvious things -- account names or email addresses -- but also some more subtle things -- like file paths (because these could contain your username, or a company name, or anything else), and even thing like VS Project Type names (because Company Foo can create their own Project Type, and might put their company name in the Project Type Name)
So anyway, there's actually not much of a story here. I can't comment on the truth or accuracy of what MJF is saying. However, what she is saying is that, in effect, the latency between usage data being locally captured/calculated, and that data being sent to Microsoft (assuming the user has allowed usage data to be sent), is now much lower than it was in the past.
For VS, at least, I know what data we have available to us. I opt-in to all of the MS data collection stuff, because I see no evidence of it being used inappropriately, and, because I know that we use it to try and understand what users are doing and why they are doing it.
Opting into the data collection stuff effectively gives you "a vote" in how we do things in future releases.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.