On April 16th, Mary Jo Foley published an article called "Microsoft looks to make product planning more science than art" where she talks about the technology, the opportunity and interviews Ronny Kohavi, the General Manager of ExP. The article goes into the history of the team and the project at Microsoft. A big part of the new technology development for this team goes on right here in Dublin. We are glad that the word is getting out!
More recent news: Randy Henne, one of the founding members of ExP and manager of the ExP program in Dublin recently talked at IMTC 2008. Slides for the IMTC talk can be found here.
One of the developers on our adCenter project, Paolo Severini, created an amazing new tool for detecting memory leaks in JavaScript. It can be installed as an Internet Explorer band and it is designed to find memory leaks in JavaScript code that runs in Internet Explorer.
Read more about it on this page and provide your feedback! And if you're excited by what you see our team doing, check out our job openings at www.joinmicrosofteurope.com.
We're excited to announce a new initiative here on the GPDE team -- Experimentation. We're going to be shipping a key part of Microsoft's new Experimentation Platform, which is a system for testing out different web designs and other experiments on real live users. It will initially be used by MSN and other online sites from Microsoft, and we have plans to eventually roll the service out to any developer using Windows Live.
Experimentation is both a technology and a philosophy. The technology is based on randomized experimental design, in which a small set of users get a new version ("treatment") of a site or service, while the rest get the old version ("control"). The system measures how effective the experiment is (by evaluating metrics designed by the site owner, like number of clicks on a page or number of purchases), and then does some analysis to see if the results are statistically significant. The platform also includes the ability to quickly auto-abort an obviously failing experiment, and even suggest other hypotheses to be tested by new experiments.
The philosophy of experimentation is simple -- "let the users decide". Traditionally, decisions are made based on the HiPPO (the Highest Paid Person's Opinion). The Experimentation Platform means our customers can instead make decisions based on the results of controlled experiments. The hippo stress toy (see picture) is for those moments when an opinion-based decision happens anyway.
Click over to exp-platform.com to learn more about experimentation at Microsoft and read some recent papers. And check out the open jobs on our recruiting site.
This week, Microsoft executive Debra Chrapaty visited our site in Dublin. We got a chance to sit with her and get her feedback on the great work we're doing for adCenter and Windows Live Mobile.
However, Debra's main purpose for visiting Dublin was not for our group (although we do like to think that J). In fact, she was here to open up Microsoft's new European data center, one of the cornerstones of Microsoft's global online presence and the first outside the US. When completed in May 2009, the data center will occupy 51,000 square meters, and Microsoft will spend €350 million to build it. One interesting aspect of the data center is that by using air cooling, it will be 50% more energy efficient than similarly-sized facilities.
Read more in the Irish Times article, and look for an upcoming guest post on our blog from Debra!
Yesterday at the eMetrics conference in Washington D.C., Ian Thomas presented some of the upcoming features of Microsoft Gatineau, a web and online advertising analytics service.
Our team in Dublin delivered several of the features mentioned in the talk including two highlighted in this blog post from Alex Cohen -- what Alex calls "Time Shifter" (sort of an ad campaign timeline) and "Treemap", a neat way to view hierarchical data like search engine referrals.
Here are a couple screenshots of these features from an earlier presentation by Ian:
You can sign up to beta test Microsoft Gatineau here: http://advertising.microsoft.com/Gatineau
Flavien Charlon is a developer on our team in Dublin, and earlier this summer he and his teammate won 3rd place in the "Interface Design" event at the Imagine Cup in Seoul, Korea. The Imagine Cup is sort of a World Cup for programmers, and it brings together people from countries all around the world to compete in individual and team events.
This year, Team Atomnium's submission was a Tablet PC-based travel guide written in .NET 3.0, complete with flippable pages, interactive maps, and embedded video. Based on that submission, they were invited to the finals, where they had 24 hours to code some kind of educational application. Fueled by coffee and chips (see the video),
Flavien and his teammate created a very clever educational drawing program for children, with an amazing "palette" schema for selecting pictures. You have to see the video to really appreciate it. You can read more about the Imagine Cup on this post from Flavien's blog, "Code is poetry" (Flavien's blog is in French -- you can use Windows Live Translator to translate to your language).
This is actually Flavien's second appearance in the winner's circle at the Imagine Cup. He (and the same teammate) placed 1st in the "Project Hoshimi" programming contest (post from Flavien's blog last year) in India in 2006.
Another developer on our team, Vincent, served as a judge at the event. Next year's event will be held in Paris, France -- good luck to all competitors!
We launched our new recruiting web site, joinmicrosofteurope.com, this past weekend.
As you can see, we're looking to fill a number of key openings for developers and leads, as well as test developer, test manager, and program manager. Please check out the site and send in your CV if you're interested.
Big thanks to the crew at Brando for doing a great job helping us build the site.
