Comments on: Judgement vs. testing

By: Tutor

Tutor — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:23:28 +0000

It’s a relieve to read intelligent analysis. Thank you!

By: Berend Schotanus

Berend Schotanus — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:44:34 +0000

even better :-)

By: Bradi

Bradi — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:03:50 +0000

@Alain – brilliant!

@Berend – I agree yet Kontra’s point still stand and Frankenstein’s lab?! …..priceless!

By: Alain Johnson

Alain Johnson — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 12:22:35 +0000

No, google is not the company of scientists, it’s the company of Frat boys. Intelligent frat boys, but frat boys nonetheless.

By: Kontra

Kontra — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 10:01:10 +0000

The Frankenstein lab? :)

By: Berend Schotanus

Berend Schotanus — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 09:29:50 +0000

What is Google?

By conception Google is the ultimate serendipity company. By coincident two students happened to discover an incredibly strong search algorithm in a PhD project. When they made it a start-up they, just by chance, connected it to a winning business formula.
No plan. No vision. Not even serious business ambitions. Just smart guys, having fun in doing science.
When you look at whatever happened since, it seems to be just an extension to this first beginning. When Googleplex looks like anything, it is a big university campus where smart guys are doing fun projects with fun experiments.
Apple is the company of a visionair. Microsoft is the company of a businessman. Google is the company of scientists. Wherever that might lead us…

By: J.M. Heinrichs

J.M. Heinrichs — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 09:13:05 +0000

Aaron
When your second statement does not follow your first, one is apt to entertain qualms about the completeness of your understanding of the problem: “testing things in the wild” is contra-indicated.

Cheers

By: Kontra

Kontra — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 22:22:02 +0000

Speaking of “reading comprehension problems”, Buzz has been a “huge disaster” not because it didn’t have green backgrounds or red buttons (the category of issues that can be surfaced by external testing and corrected), but because of one fundamental failure: default opt-out policy.

Design, interaction, and even workflow co-mingling problems I referred to can be corrected by testing and re-work, but “opt-out by default” is another animal altogether. It needs no testing whatsoever.

Let’s repeat that. In 2010, the concept needs no testing by the 3rd largest email company and the biggest information NGO in the world. They should have known and I’m sure they do know. They simply tried to cheat their way to the top of the social networking business on top of Gmail, at the expense of Facebook and Twitter. It’s as simple as that. It exposes Google’s intent. It goes to the heart of the matter: trust.

The ratio of internal vs. external testing is a red herring, which I’m sure Google would like you to get bogged down in just so that you miss their real crime here: the intent to sacrifice their customers’ security/privacy in a mad rush to beat Facebook and Twitter.

In case you misread it, that was the main theme of my piece.

By: Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:05:58 +0000

I think you misunderstood me:

http://qblog.aaronsw.com/post/400531264/heres-to-the-crazy-ones

By: Kontra

Kontra — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:56:25 +0000

I’m really not sure what exactly Swartz finds “dumb,” my claim or Google’s “whole culture” of “testing things in the wild”?

This piece answers the first possibility.