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."
Re:As opposed to ... (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.
Re:Windows 7 RC download (Score:1, Informative)
You get the award for the most paranoid person on /.
Re:Alkamai? (Score:5, Informative)
There's no L in Akamai, but yes, Akamai mirrors the static content, such as images. However, dynamic content such as search results are still served by Microsoft.
Re:Agile and all that (Score:5, Informative)
"The "Beta" in Google's case is very much a marketing issue as much as it is a technical issue"
And perhaps a commitment issue, like people who stay engaged forever but never actually get married...
Re:As opposed to ... (Score:3, Informative)
Statistics [alexa.com]. Also, scroll down and note the % of people who actually proceed to search.live.com, and then look at this [alexa.com]. (note that the last two statistics probably overlap gratuitously, so if you want to do any math, ignore the third, because the second is more precise.) And if you want some laughs, put google and yahoo into the compare boxes.