How Microsoft Degrades Their Users (In a Good Cause) 174
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."
As opposed to ... (Score:5, Funny)
(Ba da BOOM! Don't forget to tip your waitress.)
Re:As opposed to ... (Score:2, Funny)
That's sort of the same thing I was thinking. I mean, maybe they should have users that opt in to such an experience before they start degrading it.
Select groups of users (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.
One of the most often-targeted DDoS sites (Score:3, Funny)
Thanks for the reminder, it's already been a couple of hours since my last flood ping! Now if you excuse me...
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And pings to send before I sleep,
And pings to send before you sleep.
Re:One of the most often-targeted DDoS sites (Score:5, Funny)
So you ping and then you sleep()? Not much of a flood ping really...
live search is still useless... (Score:2, Funny)
but the home page of live search is great. so i open it everyday and just watch the picture.
Re:Select groups of users (Score:2, Funny)
You forgot Safari and Chrome.
Re:Agile and all that (Score:3, Funny)
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?
Didn't Jesus say "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"?
Punch your customers in the face, selectively (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?
Re:Punch your customers in the face, selectively (Score:5, Funny)
Don't be so negative. They're simply migrating the Vista experience to the Cloud.
Re:Agile and all that (Score:3, Funny)
You're right. You're absolutely right. Hey, that Bible sounds like kind of a good book.
Re:Select groups of users (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Select groups of users (Score:3, Funny)
Re:As opposed to ... (Score:5, Funny)
Experimenting by delaying a pageload for 500ms is worthy of ethical considerations?
No, they should be shot on sight.
Re:As opposed to ... (Score:4, Funny)
The summary is about graceful degradation. TFA is OFFTOPIC here.
Re:Punch your customers in the face, selectively (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, who invited the logic guy to this Microsoft bashing thread?
Re:As opposed to ... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
I submit to you (Score:5, Funny)
a web page more useless than a blank page.
http://havenworks.com/ [havenworks.com]
Thank you, and good night.
Re:One of the most often-targeted DDoS sites (Score:5, Funny)
So you ping and then you sleep()?
TODO: Insert geek related sex-joke here
Re:I submit to you (Score:2, Funny)
We had to evaluate that website for one of our IT units. In a room full of computers, all with that hideous monstrosity on the screen... where do you turn to?!
I turned to alcohol. I can still see the site, I just don't care any more. :)
Re:As opposed to ... (Score:1, Funny)
That reminds me of a Family Guy quote.
http://www.familyguyquotes.com/characters/guest-stars-quotes-5.html [familyguyquotes.com]
Peter: Hey, anybody got a quarter?
Bill Gates: What's a quarter?
Re:As opposed to ... (Score:3, Funny)
You'd probably end up fathering Seth McFarlane.
Re:As opposed to ... (Score:4, Funny)
While we're at it, can we assume that I have ten million bucks?
Absurd (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Why this is completely absurd. It would be like some moron deciding that people at Slashdot only read the top of the page and, rather than simply making a smaller page with a link to the rest of the information, only loading the top of the page until you try to scroll down and read more. Then suddenly things would jump around and muck up your concept of where you were on the page. The only thing that would be worse is if the put something cute or interesting at the bottom of the page to encourage you to scroll down to see it, and trigger this very undesirable behavior frequently.