--Greg
And, yes, people certainly do enter "yahoo" as a search query: it turns out that a lot of people depended on the fact that we'd return a whole pages of results from yahoo.com, and they'd use that as an easier way to navigate the site internals.
However, it's a long step from "people do that sometimes" to "5% of all queries are like that."
When we changed the engine so it only gave two results from a single site, we did get complaints from people who really did type "yahoo" as a query. But it continued to be the #3 result. Another really strong clue that something was rotten.
--Greg
Back at the beginning of the year, a group of Fundamentalist Christians started a Facebook group called we can find 1,000,000 people who don't believe in Evolution befor June And, yes, the typo is really in the name.
This doesn't happen all the time, and I can hardly speak for every group at Microsoft either. But it happens often enough in enough groups to be a problem. And it's my perception that it happens more and more.
--Greg
Personally I wouldn't be able to use signature verification because my signature is so inconsistent. . .
You'd be surprised how many people say that, and yet when the software gets to see their dynamic signature (as points in time, not just an image), it easily finds the things that make their signature unique and clearly distinguishes it from anyone else's. Or so it appeared, anyway. As I said, we never really got to do a proper evaluation, but we did do enough to determine that a lot of our intuitions about the problem were simply wrong.
--Greg
In plain terms, the isolated Tablet was little more than a crippled laptop, and the isolated Pocket PC was almost completely useless. Attach them to a network, though, and they become something magical. Something none of us working on them was wise enough to foresee.
--Greg
--Greg
I was at Microsoft at the same time Dick Brass was (and even reported into his organization for a while), so I'm going to beat up on him a little. (He won't mind.) We really wanted Tablet PC to be viable without a keyboard because it made such a difference in weight and size. There are a number of problems with operating such a device that way, but simply logging into it was a bear. Virtual keyboard and handwriting recognition solutions were both miserable, so we looked at biometrics. Now for a Tablet PC, the obvious biometric is signature verification, but one powerful individual in Dick Brass's organization had such a passion for fingerprint verification, that he effectively stopped us from even evaluating signature verification systems. Never mind that the fingerprint systems were extra hardware, stuck out the side, were easy to break off, etc. -- this individual was impervious to reason. Dick could have broken the logjam, but wouldn't get involved. Ultimately, we did nothing, and no serious keyboardless Tablet PCs were ever made (that I know of). This wasn't the only reason, but it was enough by itself.
This pair of problems -- the non-technical guy who kills ideas and can't be reasoned with plus upper management that can't get involved -- seems to have become depressingly common across the whole company. Bright people get discouraged and leave. People who thrive on stifling other people stay.
Where I do disagree with Dick is that I think a VP still has enough autonomy to make his/her own org successful. Microsoft's top management could still fix this problem if it consistently focused on getting and keeping the right VPs and eliminating the bad ones. I think the problem and the solution start and end in the same place.
--Greg
Of course, advanced technology might cut that to as little as ten-thousand years . . .
--Greg (Why I lost interest in terraforming)
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.