So I decided to take the plunge. Bought a brand new shining version of Windows 8. The 2GB download took some time but got over post lunch today and I decided to test ride it. Here are my experiences with various aspects. Remember this is day one and I am not too fond of reading tutorials so I might not have figured out everything.

The Install

I think it took approx. 2 hrs. I choose the option of retaining my settings and apps. Maybe I should not have done that but anyways I thought it was taking too long. One good thing of that time was that I was able to call some friends and talk to them during that time. Overall the process was smooth and I just had to uninstall some Bluetooth software for compatibility. Everything else just worked.

The UI

Ok there is no start button and you start with some tiles. But that is OK. I guess mobile devices have already got us used to different ways of interacting with our machines. BTW I use Android not Windows. I did get used to it in some time and ya did figure out how to see all apps after some mouse moving. Since the other apps look pretty much the same, did not need much time to pick up things.

The Browser

So we do have a new IE which does look different. Overall I am loving the new interface. Like the fact that it occupies the whole window. Like the concept of private tabs as it enables me to login to another adwords account. The right clicks have changed but that is OK. Sometimes it takes some effort to figure out where to right click but that is ok. Speed is fine as long as you don’t have too many tabs. My usual number of tabs is 10-15 which includes 2 Gmails, FB, Hootsuite, Analytics and Adwords. It becomes sluggish when I added youtube also. When a single window hangs, all go down. And then I found the most irritating bug. I use an internal tool which uses HTTP auth and my browser just refuses to remember the user id/password here. I am sure MS will fix it but annoying for me at this point.

Social Hub

I did all my social accounts but still not sure if I will use it much. I did see that it did not have a simple way to update multiple accounts which is almost a basic need for me now. I use Seesmic or Hootsuite for that. Yet to find much use but time will tell if this is usable. I am a heavy social media user so this better be good to make me migrate.

The Performance

So far so good. This was one of the main reason why I migrated from Win 7. Looks fine as of now but I won’t jump to conclusions at this point. Will cover this more in my next review.

Moral of the Story

I am OK right now. Not very excited but not disappointed either. I will write another review in few days. So stay tuned…

1. My boss sucks and I want to be my own boss
2. I am bored of my job
3. All my friends are doing it
4. I have nothing to lose
5. I just heard an inspirational speech
6. I am from premier institute
7. I want to make loads of money
8. I want to become famous
9. I have bad interviewing skills
10. All of the above

Tell me what you think are bad reasons?

And thankfully yes…..

Search space was almost becoming boring. Almost everybody used Google and despite significant innovations by Yahoo ( I do like Glue pages ), search market was like the family soap operas.

Let me divide search engine evaluation into various areas and place where different players are.

Infrastructure
Search is a big beast now. Billions of pages changing at an alarming pace and billions of queries happening all over the world. To make the marriage between both is not a task for the faint hearted and the marriage has to made in split second. Infrastructure is about crawling all the pages and also providing index updates in real time. Since users are spread across all parts of the world infrastructure needs to be distributed and multi layered.

Google – best in breed. Use large farms of commodity hardware. They are amazingly fast in crawl. When we launched our site Google crawlers were at our gate in no time.

Yahoo – Pretty much the same as Google in terms of hardware. I do see a slackin their crawl speed. They do keep a backlog.

Bing – Dunno. One of the guy in my office said that Bing is so fast that it feels as if it is running on Linux. Not sure if my friends out there will think of this as a complement.

User Interface

Some people did think that Orkut and Myspace had good UIs till Facebook came along. You can’t fight with the user. You just have to respect him/her.

Google – familiarity breeds contempt. All of us have been so used to it that now you are a little bit bored ( mid life crisis kicking in ).

Yahoo – Did some interesting innovations recently in terms of glue pages. Glue pages brought the idea of different type of content together so that you can use search as a decision making tool ( although Microsoft is marketing Bing this way )

Bing – The UI is a little bit Googlish but few nifty additions. Previews – they really extract the relevant info well. In page – options do make life easier. The biggest surprise in the UI is speed. It is amazingly fast. Much much better then Google and Yahoo. I guess they should borrow some things from Yahoo glue and they will rock more.

Query Interpretation and Suggestion

If the world had a single language and a single way of expressing our needs, so many of us would be out of jobs. In the search space you can never tell the user that the query is wrong. You need to prompt the user to input the right thing or make assumptions and answer him.

Google – come on they got to be best. The query interpretation improves as you get more queries. Google has great minds working to derive knowledge from their query stream. The results show.

Yahoo – Not as good as Google but OK.

Bing – too early to comment but things work out here.

Result Relevancy

The holy grail of search lies here. All the back end algorithms which work so hard to make the marriage happen between the content and the intent.

Google – obviously much ahead

Yahoo – a worthy second

Bing – looks pretty good from what i see

Distribution

No point in having a great product but not getting enough users to use it. Google and Yahoo and their search bars and distribution deals with browsers has ensured that people can use them with significantly less friction.

Google – has become so omnipresent that they don’t need it anymore. Integrations with browsers and toolbars obviously helps.

Yahoo – Has all the distribution but people still do not use them much.

Bing – I bet Microsoft will pull out some tricks here. They have the muscle and brains to distribute it in innovative ways. I am waiting to see action here.

Now let us hit the road…. some real life queries

“where to find branded jeans in bangalore” – Bing wins here. Google is confused in branded and brand new.

“opensource testing tools” – all of them look fine

“bal krishn birla” – Little bit of ego surfing. I like Bing here as it brings up my FB profile

“iit kanpur hall 2 photos” – none of them works. Good that none of them gave me Hall 3 photos otherwise, I would have filed a law suit against all of them.

“dolo 650″ – all of them are bad

“#pj on twitter”- all you guys missed the trick. Run and fix. I am looking for the trend not Paul J

“obama speech in cairo” – Google and Yahoo look better then Bing here… Bing’s second link is an article before the speech.

“who invented the light bulb”- Bing gives direct answer

“iit kanpur galaxy” – Love you Bing. In IITK Galaxy is not related to astronomy but culture.

OK… Enogh now. Can’t keep searching everything on 3 search engines forever.

Times have changed or evolved to put it in a different perspective. Mankind has an age old endeavour, how to make life simpler and better ( after making it complicated and worse). In the stone age the primary mode of survival was by hunting and human beings primarily developed tools aimed towards making that process simpler. Life moved on and our species figured out how to do agriculture. That was one major step in making life complicated. Agriculture needed people to settle down as it would take time for plants to grow. This obviously led to lot of lifestyle changes and human beings started creating next set of complications in their life. You would not have thought of checking email or writing a blog if you were busy with chasing wild animals or wild animals chasing you.

The next wave came few thousand years later. When we moved from a system of almost everyone doing everything ( unless you were a king ) to an era of specializations. You could survive just by putting a OK seal on a Nike shoe without ever knowing how leather is made (who the hell wants to know that anyway). This created another interesting opportunity for mankind to make things complicated.you were a computer engineer then you could create buzz words like CORBA, OOPS, XML and scare the hell out of everyone around. If you were a doctor you can have some complicated names of diseases and lack of ability to pronounce these diseases correctly can itself be called another disease. So anyway things moved on. I am sure you are almost wondering by now if there is any co relation between the title of my article and content, so let us get back to the real issue.

Technology is primarily about building these complications and their solutions and building forgiving technology is all about building e technology in such a way that all the complications are hidden from the end user. So let us look at some stone age tools. These tools were simple and they did the work they were meant for. They never published a user manual on how to use them and never gave you a shock if you did not use them in the prescribed way. But now you might argue that this was primarily because these tools accomplished very simple tasks. This is precisely where I beg to differ my fellow earthians ( not sure if that is even a word ). I think that lot of people building the technology are just not able to put themselves in their customer shoes which come in a wide variety of sizes and colors. They always assume a user manual or basic framework of assumptions and fall flat on face when the technology gets used in an out of the box manner. So long live the example of washing machines being used as Lassi maker in Punjab . I am sure the washing machine makers never thought of this usecase while building it.

So next time you are building any piece of technology, just imagine that there is no user manual. Just get NUM ( No User Manual ) principle embedded in your psyche. If you are software developer writing code to add two numbers do not forget the case where both the inputs might be perfectly right but the sum might still have an integer overflow. If you are a restaurant owner it is a better idea to label what is salt and what is pepper after all how many people can guess it based on the number of holes. So the idea is very simple that understand your user very well, the smartest one and the dumbest one also ( both might correspond to the same human being in some cases ). And always ensure that you forgive them for all their mistakes after all you as a technology builder is existence because you have users. Your life is not worth a meaning without that user set.

Happy Forgiving Technology Building !

PS: This blog entry is also posted at http://fourint.com/blog/?p=48.

Hmmmm…. I sound crazy in the current context but here are few things which can potentialy kill Google.

1. Click Fraud – a company which lives by clicks dies by clicks(fraud ones). Click fraud has been an area of concern for lot of advertisers and they are bound to strike back. Initialy when people moved from traditional advertising models to internet advertising, they loved the measurability, simplicity and speed. But now the advertisers want to see real returns. They will not give Google their money just because they do not have better options. How about advertising in a revenue sharing mode(CPGC – Cost Per Good Click)?

2. End of search – Will search always be a big issue? Do you think that your TV remote is something for which you will pay a bagfull of money. The time is not far away when file search and net search will not be too different. I am sure Microsoft is already working on this. Browsers became non important part of the internet economy as features became competetive. Same is going to happen with search. Another issue with search is that it is totally non sticky application and migration for user is so easy that the companies will not even realize and exodus will happen.

3. Will people continue to do things on internet using a computer? I don’t think so. The computer is bound to make people’s life dull and boring to an extent that they would like to go back to humans in few years. Currently companies take pride in telling customers that you can access them via computers. Twenty years down the line, you might see ads which wil boast of the human touch. Computer will become a back end device.

4. What about Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft – Don’t write them off. Each one of them is capable of striking back with vengance. Yahoo has been involved in establishing a relationship with users ensuring they touch all parts of their life. Amazon has been banking on web services and SOA models to drive growth and has also into A9. Microsoft has an old history of beating the shit out of other companies and they always miss the first bus by design but catch the second bus and drive it with such a speed that the first bus along with it’s passengers gets crushed.

5. Business via innovation – Google as per insiders information is more of a programmer’s paradise with innovations coming from these programmers. Is this a model which will continue to work as software industry becomes more mature. Innovation is important for companies to differentiate their service offerings but overdose of innovation without business perspective can also blow you up. Google with it’s background of coding before counting dollars may not be able to sustain.