I seem to remember reading that Bill Gates only started his philanthopic spree when his mom confronted him about his vast wealth and insisted he donate much of it to charitable causes. (I hope I'm not getting my facts wrong here.)
Paul Allen has given a lot of money to medical research, but being ill seems to have been the impetus for that.
Both men also have their name slapped on many of the non-profit projects to which they donate.
I'm not saying this makes their contributations any less important. But it does seem to make the spirit of the donations a little less impressive, since the men likely would not have been so generous without such "external" pressures.
Does anyone agree or am I being too idealistic to hope for true altruism?
Blog Inaccuracies
on
Google Tidbits
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I also attended and took detailed notes at Mayer's talk at PARC and would like to say that although Alan Williamson does a good job of highlighting the key points, he gets many of the details and facts wrong.
Going through Williamson's blog points one at a time, I will state the inaccuracies in those which need revising:
1. Mayer never said the Google founders "didn't know HTML." What she actually said was that Brin came up with the original look, but decided not to add complexity because "he said he didn't do HTML" (emphasis theirs), as in he considered it pedestrian and didn't want to bother with it.
3. It wasn't search usage that doubled when they fixed the spell-checker's back-end, nor is it correct that they found the bottom to be best. Here's what Mayer actually said: the original spell-checker ("Did You Mean" feature) was very bad and would make suggestions like "Turbotax" -> "Turbot ax" and to keep it less conspicuous, they kept the spelling revision suggestions in light grey text at the top of the page. Then, they improved the spell checker from the back end, and saw that the click-throughs of the "Did you mean" feature doubled. As the feature got better, they made the text larger and red, and this caused click-throughs of Did You Mean to double again. However they noticed many users were still complaining using the feedback link at the bottom that the search results weren't useful, and when they checked what the search was of those users, they found misspellings (i.e. users had overlooked the Did You Mean at the top). So, they added an additional Did You Mean at the bottom of the page, to catch those people, and the click-throughs doubled once again.
5. It's not so much that Orkut didn't have go through the normal Google UI procedures, it's that because it's his 20%-time personal project that he's still toying with (most of which he did in 4 days, according to Mayer), it's not really part of Google's official feature set. It's really just that guy's personal project that they may use at some point down the road. Mayer never said anything about the "loads it places on the system," so it's unclear if it's hosted on Google servers at all, or if high volume is even an issue.
6. Mayer didn't say Excite@Home users often get to see new features. What she said was that a long time ago, they did one experiment where they wanted to see if having thumbnails of the search results was a good idea, but they knew they would need to find high-bandwidth users to test it on. So, they decided to use Excite@Home's IP range to test it on them, and they got so many complaints from those users (mostly due to having many fewer results above the page fold as a result of the thumbnails), that they scrapped the idea. There was no indication they did any more experiments with Excite@Home or other broadband users exclusively.
7. When she said they have the largest network of translators, the context is that Google has a site where you can sign up to help translate Google's help pages and interface into your language: https://services.google.com/tc/Welcome.html
11. The 6 types of email users were discovered over the course of qualitative observations of users brought into the lab to test Gmail (and often observed from a distance, to give the user email privacy). Two specific types of emailers she mentioned are: "file & deleters" and "hunt & peck folks, who are comfortable leaving some emails unread".
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to remember reading that Bill Gates only started his philanthopic spree when his mom confronted him about his vast wealth and insisted he donate much of it to charitable causes. (I hope I'm not getting my facts wrong here.)
Paul Allen has given a lot of money to medical research, but being ill seems to have been the impetus for that.
Both men also have their name slapped on many of the non-profit projects to which they donate.
I'm not saying this makes their contributations any less important. But it does seem to make the spirit of the donations a little less impressive, since the men likely would not have been so generous without such "external" pressures.
Does anyone agree or am I being too idealistic to hope for true altruism?
Going through Williamson's blog points one at a time, I will state the inaccuracies in those which need revising:
1. Mayer never said the Google founders "didn't know HTML." What she actually said was that Brin came up with the original look, but decided not to add complexity because "he said he didn't do HTML" (emphasis theirs), as in he considered it pedestrian and didn't want to bother with it.
3. It wasn't search usage that doubled when they fixed the spell-checker's back-end, nor is it correct that they found the bottom to be best. Here's what Mayer actually said: the original spell-checker ("Did You Mean" feature) was very bad and would make suggestions like "Turbotax" -> "Turbot ax" and to keep it less conspicuous, they kept the spelling revision suggestions in light grey text at the top of the page. Then, they improved the spell checker from the back end, and saw that the click-throughs of the "Did you mean" feature doubled. As the feature got better, they made the text larger and red, and this caused click-throughs of Did You Mean to double again. However they noticed many users were still complaining using the feedback link at the bottom that the search results weren't useful, and when they checked what the search was of those users, they found misspellings (i.e. users had overlooked the Did You Mean at the top). So, they added an additional Did You Mean at the bottom of the page, to catch those people, and the click-throughs doubled once again.
5. It's not so much that Orkut didn't have go through the normal Google UI procedures, it's that because it's his 20%-time personal project that he's still toying with (most of which he did in 4 days, according to Mayer), it's not really part of Google's official feature set. It's really just that guy's personal project that they may use at some point down the road. Mayer never said anything about the "loads it places on the system," so it's unclear if it's hosted on Google servers at all, or if high volume is even an issue.
6. Mayer didn't say Excite@Home users often get to see new features. What she said was that a long time ago, they did one experiment where they wanted to see if having thumbnails of the search results was a good idea, but they knew they would need to find high-bandwidth users to test it on. So, they decided to use Excite@Home's IP range to test it on them, and they got so many complaints from those users (mostly due to having many fewer results above the page fold as a result of the thumbnails), that they scrapped the idea. There was no indication they did any more experiments with Excite@Home or other broadband users exclusively.
7. When she said they have the largest network of translators, the context is that Google has a site where you can sign up to help translate Google's help pages and interface into your language: https://services.google.com/tc/Welcome.html
11. The 6 types of email users were discovered over the course of qualitative observations of users brought into the lab to test Gmail (and often observed from a distance, to give the user email privacy). Two specific types of emailers she mentioned are: "file & deleters" and "hunt & peck folks, who are comfortable leaving some emails unread".