This is a pretty cool story of how experimentation can quickly show whether something is a good idea, or a bad idea:

Geeking with Greg: Early Amazon: Shopping cart recommendations

I loved the idea of making recommendations based on the items in your Amazon shopping cart. Add a couple things, see what pops up. Add a couple more, see what changes.

The idea of recommending items at checkout is nothing new. Grocery stories put candy and other impulse buys in the checkout lanes. Hardware stores put small tools and gadgets near the register.

…

I hacked up a prototype. On a test site, I modified the Amazon.com shopping cart page to recommend other items you might enjoy adding to your cart. Looked pretty good to me. I started showing it around.

While the reaction was positive, there was some concern. In particular, a marketing senior vice-president was dead set against it. His main objection was that it might distract people away from checking out — it is true that it is much easier and more common to see customers abandon their cart at the register in online retail — and he rallied others to his cause.

At this point, I was told I was forbidden to work on this any further. I was told Amazon was not ready to launch this feature. It should have stopped there.

Instead, I prepared the feature for an online test. I believed in shopping cart recommendations. I wanted to measure the sales impact.

I heard the SVP was angry when he discovered I was pushing out a test. But, even for top executives, it was hard to block a test. Measurement is good. The only good argument against testing would be that the negative impact might be so severe that Amazon couldn’t afford it, a difficult claim to make. The test rolled out.

The results were clear. Not only did it win, but the feature won by such a wide margin that not having it live was costing Amazon a noticeable chunk of change. With new urgency, shopping cart recommendations launched.

When in doubt, try it out. Get some data. Avoid confirmation bias!

Recently, PC World had a list of the Top 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time. I noticed this entry:

PCWorld.com - The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

15. Iomega Zip Drive (1998)

Click for enlarged view. Click-click-click. That was the sound of data dying on thousands of Iomega Zip drives. Though Iomega sold tens of millions of Zip and Jaz drives that worked flawlessly, thousands of the drives died mysteriously, issuing a clicking noise as the drive head became misaligned and clipped the edge of the removable media, rendering any data on that disc permanently inaccessible.

Alright… the Click of Death problem was bad. It was really bad. But from what I recalled, it wasn’t until later in the life span of the product that this started to happen. What I do remember was that Zip disks became enormously poular because of how much content it could hold, and the convenience it offered. Suddenly, multimedia was transportable in a rewritable fashion!

I’m sure there could have been a better entry in the Top 25 Worst Tech Product of All Time.

They might have a confusing name, but the latest release of their website is pretty awesome: http://local.live.com.

Just think of it as “Maps”. Yeah.

Ever since the widely reported changes to Microsoft’s HR-related announcement
happened, a few people asked me in e-mail what I thought.

Alas, I’m crazy busy shipping software to answer in depth right now, so I’ll
just point to some links that I think are relevant, and offer a few super quick
thoughts:

• Seattle PI reports:
  
  Microsoft unveils new worker perks
• 
  Bubba’s thoughts
• Omar’s thoughts

My quick thoughts:

• I have a lot of respect for
  LisaB.
  Back when I worked in the MacBU, Lisa, as VP of our group, would make the
  effort to schlep down to SVC to host a local All Hands meeting multiple
  times a year. She would often get some tough questions (and then there was
  the infamous Jimmy question) and
  answer them with candor. I greatly appreciated the effort. Since she became
  SVP of HR, I’ve sent her an email with some feedback, and she took the time
  to thoroughly reply, and again with candor. All good things.
• I hope more changes are coming. More transparency would be better.
  Personally, I think we should experiment with 360 reviews. But for now, I’m
  just glad that office supplies are going to be restocked.

• Mini-MSFT’s blog
  isn’t exactly a non-trivial blog to write. Mini clearly spends time writing
  and maintaining the blog. I think that’s one of the things that really sets
  Microsoft’s employees and culture apart from others. It’s not just a rant
  blog, it’s an effort to get things changed. That said…

• Mini-MSFT’s blog’s commenters definitely do not represent
  the best of Microsoft much of the time. In particular, I’m exceptionally
  appalled at the comments comparing working at Microsoft to "sweatshops".
  Having spent a bit of my time in New York’s garment industry, I know a
  little something about sweatshops, and let me tell you, unless you are
  getting paid a nickel per .cpp file/spec/bug regardless of the prevailing
  minimum wage, you are not working at a sweatshop. When your company commits
  to paying at least at the 65th percentile (which should mean better than
  market if the assumptions hold), you are not working at a sweatshop. I truly
  hope that some of the more whiny commenters don’t actually work at MS, or if
  they do, that I never have to work with them.

• MSFT
  stock… well… I don’t know what to say.

Phew, what a crazy day at work. After I got home, I relaxed by watching Frontline on PBS (in HD). The episode I watched was on retiring in America - wow, it’s a pretty scary story. I never knew that 401k was a small invention created specifically to help xerox’s executives.

Here’s an interesting thought on what you need to retire:

FRONTLINE: can you afford to retire?: what you need to know | PBS

What do experts say should be the combined employee/employer amount put into a 401(k) each year?

Fifteen to 18 percent of salary, every year, for 30 years is the recommendation from most experts. Most advise having roughly ten times annual pay accumulated in a 401(k)-style plan by retirement time.

Wow that’s a lot of money. Be sure to watch the video, or see it on broadcast. As is typical of Frontline, there are definitely some interesting stories. It was pretty eye-openning. The last sentence of the show is shocking, but not very surprising.

I dropped by the
Market Place 2006
fair today, hosted at the Computer
History Museum by the Chamber of
Commerce Mountain View. Though I’ve worked in Mountain View for almost 6
years, and lived there for over 5, I’m always finding new businesses - so I
thought I’d drop by to see what was going on. Plus, it was within walking
distance of my office.

There, Minnie Ingersoll of Google was giving a talk about their Wifi
deployment in Mountain View. Neato!

Being a geek, and a network engineer in a past life, here are some of the notes I took:

• They are going to be offering 1 megabit access.
• Focus on outdoor areas (parks, businesses, libraries)
  versus homes.
• Will be promoting CPE’s (Customer Premise Equipment) so that you have
  better reception indoors.
• They have 350 Tropos units around Mountain View. (One of which is
  outside my office window!)
• They use a mesh network – the Tropos units talk to each other, so the
  only wiring they had to do was power.
• 1 in 7 (50) of the sites connect back to an Alvarion gateway.
• There are 3 of these Alvarion gateways: 1 at Googleplex, 1 at 444 Castro
  St in Downtown (it’s one of the tallest buildings around), and 1 at St.
  Greg’s High School’s Football Field lights.
• Rolling release: June-Small, July-Large, August-Really large.
• People who connect will immediate see a login page. They will need to
  login with their Google Account to use the wifi.
• After logging in, people will then see a portal page, with a map, a
  search box, and a few "modules" on the sides for things like weather, mail,
  and etc.
• A FAQ can be found here:
  
  http://wifi.google.com/city/mv/faq.html 

Here’s a picture of a tower that I took:

I also got some free chicken sausage samples from the Tied House - so much for the calories spent during the walk. In any case, I’m curious to see how this will work out when this service goes live and I’m in
Downtown! I’m pretty sure that MetroFi (the free wifi in Sunnyvale) doesn’t require a login. But they do something else… (my apartment only gets reception on certain days during certain weather.)

Wow! How time flies!

It’s been one year since I left the MacBU and started working on Windows Live Toolbar (formerly known as MSN Search Toolbar.)

Farewell MacBU, Entourage. Hello MSN Search Toolbar!

What a wild and crazy year it has been. I’ve met so many new people, so many new technologies, embarked on so many partnerships, and worked on so many cool features. Oh yeah… those cool features are coming! And they’ll really help the way you surf the web. Or, at least the way I surf the web.
Having worked on infrastructural changes for a significant part of these last 12 months, and now working on some nifty end user features, my goals for this coming year are to meet more customers directly. Among other things, it’s been a while since I’ve been to any conferences. I think the last real conference I went to was WWDC back in 2004!

What conferences would you recommend?

JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3™

What is Jungle Disk?

Jungle Disk is an application that lets you store files and backup data securely to Amazon.com’s S3™ Storage Service.

* Store an unlimited amount of data for only 15? per gigabyte
* No monthly subscription fee, no startup fee, no commitment
* Your data is fully encrypted at all times
* Data is stored at multiple Amazon.com datacenters around the country for high availability
* Access files directly from Windows Explorer, Mac OSX Finder, and Linux

This looks pretty interesting. Personally I use FolderShare to mirror the 3 machines I use daily, with a machine in New York to geographically distribute the data, perform backups 4 times a day, and to ensure that files are still accessible if my 3 computers are all off. The best part is that I don’t have to do anything - everytime I make a change to a file that is FolderShared, it is automatically replicated across CheungNet(TM). Jungle Disk, on the other hand, looks like it is more manual.

Still, I might give this a try for fun.