Why Google’s search engine secretly sucks
While Google touts its speed in returning results, and indeed the speed is impressive, it’s not the speed that matters. What matters is quality of the results and this is why Google’s search secretly sucks. Let’s explore.
Google circa 1998
When Google first began in the late 90s, it fumbled to make a significant impact in search. It couldn’t quite figure out how to make searching that much better than what was already in place. From those early days until about 2005 and through many man hours of work, Google’s speed and results have improved. But, those improvements pretty much abruptly ended approximately 2005-2007. You know, right around the time that Android was a twinkle in someone’s eye. Since then, all we have pretty much seen is stagnation in search technology. Search hasn’t improved in recent years, and even Google acknowledges this because instead of spending time improving search, now Google spends its copious free time creating Android, Gmail, Google Apps, Google Chrome, ChromeOS, Chrome tablets, Google Play, Google Docs, Google Maps, YouTube and the list goes on. These are diversionary tactics to keep you from seeing just how bad Google search quality really is.
Searching Google Today
While Google’s search technology is still the fastest available and is still better than most other engines, it’s really become stagnant. So stagnant, in fact, that the quality of the search results really matter very little to Google. For example, I would say that at least 1-2 links out of every search I have performed in the last year is dead. Basically, it displays results for sites that are either down, sites that lead to placeholder pages or sites that lead to 404 or other unusable content.
I mean, what’s the point in that? I don’t want to look back in time at links that may have had revelance in 1998 or even 2003, I want to find links that are relevant to me today. It’s clear that while Google says they are doing quality optimizations, what they claim and what’s actually coming up in the search results is entirely different. Something about this situation isn’t working.
Dead Links
Really? I mean, come on Google. What’s the point in placing a completely dead link in the top 3 search results? What purpose does that really serve? What this says is that Google has so much cruft and garbage inside their database that’s now becoming dominant during search results. If that’s where we are today, it’s only going to get progressively worse, not better. Note, I’m finding it’s not just one link that’s bad, but several on the same set of results.
This issue is completely preventable. But, it’s going to take automation to fix this. Google needs to scour its indexed links and validate whether or not a site is actually providing the data it’s supposed to be providing. Instead, it appears Google found a page there some years ago, indexed it and that’s the way it has stayed. In reality, this cruft needs to be regularly cleaned out. If search results had index dates stamped near the results stating when the information was originally indexed, I could simply avoid clicking a link that was last indexed 5 years ago. In fact, with the right UI, I could even request it to include only results that have been indexed in the last 12 months, perhaps even in the last 3 months. Maybe this is there in the ‘advanced search area’? It’s certainly not there in the basic search results.
Fresh Content
By knowing when an indexed link was created in Google and by allowing exclusion of old links, I can then tailor my search results to the most recent and freshest content. Granted, Google should automatically be doing this on my behalf, but they aren’t. Instead, it’s just all manner of random old garbage that gets thrown up in search results… and this is exactly the reason Google’s search secretly sucks.
Can it be fixed? Yes. Will Google ever really fix this? Probably not. It’s not really worth their time at this point. They’re too interested in screwing over SEO, invading privacy in Android and doing other projects unrelated to search. All of those projects are far more attractive and cool to ever consider spending time doing ugly old janitorial work to clean up the mess they created in the first place. No one likes having to clean up a mess. Cleanup work never involves using cool new technologies, but yet it still has to get done. Unfortunately, this is the very real, very ugly secret why Google’s search sucks. It’s also the secret that Google doesn’t want you to know.
Recipe: Spicy Fusion Tuna Salad
In an effort to find lower calorie alternatives, I’m always trying things in the kitchen. Well, here’s another recipe I’ve come up with that I personally think is quite tasty. If you like somewhat sweet and hot salads, this one will fill that void for you.
Spicy Fusion Tuna Salad
- 1 can drained very low sodium tuna
- 1/4 – 1/3 cup chopped Japanese cucumber (regular cucumber will work too)
- 1/4 – 1/3 cup diced pickled Japanese radish
- 2 tablespoons horseradish mustard
- 1-2 tablespoons Tuong ot toi (chili garlic hot sauce)
- 10 drops stevia liquid (or one dry packet)
- 10 drops Sweet n Low liquid (or one dry packet)
- 1/4 teaspoon black sesame seeds
Drain the tuna, place into bowl and flake with fork until it’s more or less shredded. Add all of the ingredients except sesame seeds and sweetener into a bowl and mix. You may want to add more mustard if you prefer your salad with thicker dressing. Add less if you prefer it more dry. I prefer it slightly less wet. You can add more or less hot sauce to taste. You can also add a pinch of salt and pepper if you prefer. Once mixed, add sweetener and mix in.
Once the salad is fully mixed, place atop rice crackers, saltines, toast or eat it just as it is. Top with black sesame seeds. This will make enough salad for one person as a meal or split it between two people with other side dishes.
Enjoy!
Zazzle: An exercise in stupidity
I love the idea that Zazzle represents. Quick custom printed promotional items. The theory is that you open a store, upload an image, place it onto an item and order. You can even let other people order it. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where the idea ends.. at least with this company. Let’s explore.
What is Zazzle?
As I said, it’s basically one big short run promotional item tool. You upload your images, plop them into a garment, mug, stein, iPad case or whatever and order. The theory is that they’ll ship you the item(s) you ordered. What is reality is far different. The reason it’s far different is because this company is completely mismanaged. In fact, it appears there’s no real management driving this listing ship at all. Certainly on the surface, there appears to be the Beaver family who started up the thing that formerly was Zazzle. Now, it’s just a topsy-turvy disaster of a company that can barely even accomplish their core business offerings.
Content Management
Let’s start with the absolute most mismanaged piece of this company. The content management team. This team sits around reviewing what’s been uploaded for ‘violations’ and ‘copyright infringement’. Unfortunately, the management team doesn’t ‘get’ copyright infringement at all. In fact, the law is fairly clear on the point of copyright infringement. It’s not actually infringement until a court of law deems it so. Remember, innocent until proven guilty? To the Zazzle team, however, that a company makes a claim that something is infringing is enough to prove guilt. To prove actual infringement requires a court of law, not Zazzle. Worse, this company is policing alleged infringement on behalf of companies like Electronic Arts. It’s not Zazzle’s responsibility to police any other party’s content. Each party who owns copyrighted material can very well police and ask for removal. Zazzle doesn’t need to intervene here.
However, because companies (especially Silicon Valley companies) are running so scared that they’ll even get the slightest hint of a lawsuit, they have begun acting on behalf of companies like Electronic Arts and taking down imagery that even has the tiniest tinge of violating copyrights. Unfortunately, this company’s team must be bunch of hired monkeys. They simply see the word ‘Crysis’ and they automatically assume infringement and take the work offline. They don’t read, ask questions or bother to even review the actual image itself (which is what is actually in question). No, it’s all run by a bunch of monkeys trained to click delete. See word, click delete.
Forget about disputing any monkey deletes. There’s no reasoning or rational thought behind this team. If you create a ticket to try and dispute, you’ll get a canned response that won’t even tell you why it was deleted. They’ll just point you to the terms and conditions and let you be on your merry way. In short, they don’t want to talk to you, a store owner. Consider for a moment just how stupid that is because store owners are what’s keeping Zazzle in business.
Just The Tip
The Content Management team is merely the tip of this iceberg. I’ve seen so many complaints regarding this company that they are even listed on Ripoff Report 20 times (so far). Worse, no one from the company even reviews Ripoff Report to post rebuttals or head off any of these disputes. As I said, this company is squarely mismanaged.
If you are in business, you would want to take that business seriously. By ‘seriously’, that means treating all consumer complaints as valid and doing something about. You don’t let complaints stew and fester unless you actually want your company to appear to be a ripoff.
Stores
Part of the way this company works is by allowing registered users to put up their own Zazzle store where they can market and sell custom items from within Zazzle’s inventory. This is, in fact, where Zazzle makes its money. Store owners put up content, Zazzle takes a cut on each item sold. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where this story ends. Even if you do manage to get your imagery through the Content Management team’s monkey review, that doesn’t mean your item will really ship if you place an order. According to some complainants, the items never arrive. Basically, when you pay, you are taking your chances that the item will actually arrive.
Even worse, though, is that you spend your time, effort and good faith into placing your items in the Zazzle store. Yet there’s no promotional system or anything you can leverage to try and get people into your store to buy. You’re squarely left to fend for yourself to get people into your store. You would think Zazzle would offer at least some kind of promotional vehicle to feature stores with certain types of items. But, no. There is no advertising system available. Again, you are left to fend for yourself. It’s up to you to post on Facebook, Twitter and buy advertising space to get people into your Zazzle store.
Worse, even if you do manage to get people into your store to buy, those people could then have problems just getting their paid items.
No ‘About The Company’ page?
For me, this is a huge problem with any company trying to be respectable in its industry. If you aren’t willing to put up information regarding your management team, where that team is located, investor information, address information, etc.. it certainly looks like you’re not really serious about being in business. If you visit Zazzle’s corporate information page, you will find nothing there about the management team, investor information or anything pertinent to this company.
If anything, this lack of information says they are a ripoff fly-by-night. I know, they’ve been in business for several years now, but who knows how that’s happened as mismanaged as this thing is. However, even former employees have choice things to say on Glassdoor. The primary complaints seem to be high turnover, low pay and lack of upward movement. That doesn’t surprise me. Seems to me this is the McDonald’s of Silicon Valley startups.
Recommendation
If you’re a company thinking of opening a Zazzle store, you should reconsider. Attaching your company’s name to Zazzle could taint your business reputation in the long term. This is especially true if you’re trying to grow an existing business. The last thing you need is dealing with complaints from people who’ve tried to purchase from your Zazzle store only to be ripped off.
Instead, if you really do want to buy custom printed items, you will want to get them from somewhere else. There are thousands of reputable promotional item companies who create and sell printed promotional items. In fact, you can do much better in pricing on those items when you buy them in bulk. Zazzle is really to be used for extremely short runs (1-10 pieces). With short runs, you will pay a high premium price, which is quite evident in the pricing model Zazzle offers.
Instead, I highly recommend you shop around for companies whose sole business it is to sell custom printed promotional items. Promotional item companies don’t offer store fronts to people, don’t deal with content management, don’t do short runs, don’t deal with individual consumer returns, etc. No, they are solely focused on getting you your promotional items exactly as you want and shipping them directly to you. Yes, you’ll end up paying more up front for the bulk quantity, but if you’re giving the items away at a conference or event, the cost per item is much much lower. Better, you can pick the exact quality of the item you want. With Zazzle, the quality is what it is. There’s little choice. If you don’t like the t-shirt brands they are using, tough luck. If you want to buy a specific brand of polo-style shirts to give away, you’ll need to choose another company to produce your item.
iOS7: Lightning Cables vs Consumer — Who Wins?
There’s this really annoying error message that you might see if you’ve bought a third party Lightning cable and you try to use it on your iPhone under iOS7. The error message reads “This cable or accessory is not certified and may not work reliably with this iPod” (or iPhone or iPad or whatever). Let’s explore what this means.
Consumer Penalized
Let’s start simple. You bought a Lightning cable and expected it to work. Within each Lightning cable there’s a unique identifier that an Apple device can read. It then compares the identifier to some kind of database within the iDevice to see if Apple ‘blessed’ the cable. Basically, any company producing Lightning connector cables must license the technology from Apple.
I’m fine with licensing. But, that’s a legal distinction between the cable manufacturer and Apple. The consumer should not be involved in this fight. Yet, here we are. This battle is being waged on you, the Apple consumer. You’re penalized for having bought an ‘unlicensed’ cable. Unfortunately, unlicensed cables don’t specifically come with a warning stating that they are not licensed. So, the consumer is buying blind when buying cables. There is no way to know if a cable is licensed or not. At least, not without an Apple device that tells us so.
Apple’s missteps
With the old big dock connectors, the devices were able to recognize unsupported accessories or cables and warn. And, they did. Those cables also had a method to do validation checks similar to this Lightning validation error message. Again, I’m fine with that as long is tells me immediately after I purchase a cable and plug it in. If it doesn’t work immediately after purchase, I can return cable immediately. No money lost.
Unfortunately, Apple waited all through iOS6 and the iPhone 5 allowing use of the Lightning connector without ANY warning. Instead, they waited until iOS7’s release to warn the consumer and even prevent some cables from working AT ALL. Yes, that’s what this error message actually means. It means that Apple has detected an unlicensed cable and in some cases will warn that it either cannot use it or warns you that it may not work. Apparently, that warning message may warn for a number of times before permanently disabling the cable’s use.
While these cables worked perfectly fine with iOS6, some of them don’t work at all to either charge the device or for data transfer under iOS7. Some of the cables do work, but possibly for only a short time. But, this isn’t the point. If the cables worked perfectly fine under iOS6, they will also work perfectly fine under iOS7. This means that Apple is deliberately and intentionally preventing these cables from working.
Waited Too Long
The huge misstep is that Apple waited over a year to warn consumers. And when something is finally given to us, it’s not a friendly notice. The device simply prevents some cables from outright working. Keep in mind that that’s a year of time that many people spent money buying many of these cables. Cables that can no longer be returned and can no longer be used. Apple has waged war on you, the consumer. They are not waging war on the manufacturer who produced ‘unlicensed’ cables. This action is actually causing monetary damages to the consumer for the lost money spent to purchase the cables. Some cables that previously worked no longer work and the consumer cannot return them nor can these cables be used.
Apple has effectively just slapped its very user base in the face and said, ‘F-you’. I can’t imagine any other company doing this in this way. At least give your users some advance warning this is coming. Don’t just do it, tell no one and expect us all to sit here all nice and happy. It’s not my problem that manufacturers are making ‘uncertified’ cables. That’s your problem, Apple. You need to take those manufacturers to court. Don’t penalize your paying consumers because you don’t think the cables should work.
And note, the cable I purchased is a retractable cable. I only bought it because there was no other retractable Lightning cable on the market when I purchased. If Apple had produced one, I’d have bought it from Apple.
Class Action Lawsuit
I can easily see this turn into a class action lawsuit against Apple. As a consumer, we had no way to know the cable wasn’t licensed until the warning message, a warning message that showed up over a year late. And, in fact, iOS7 doesn’t even state the cable is unlicensed, it states that it’s not certified. As a consumer, that’s not my problem. I bought the cable, it worked. iOS6 didn’t warn me of this problem and it continued to work. Now, Apple is telling me that that cable can no longer work with my device even though it worked perfectly fine with the same exact device for many months prior to iOS7.
Plain and simple, consumers have now lost money paid for these cables. Apple is to blame. If they had enforced this policy from the beginning, this wouldn’t be an issue. Because they didn’t, consumers are now literally paying the price as Apple intentionally stops these cables from working even though they are perfectly usable cables.
I’d really like to see an attorney sue the crap out of Apple for this behavior and force Apple to redress all of us consumers’ for our money that we’ve lost because Apple sat on its fat butt not saying anything. Apple just sat there letting consumers buy more and more unlicensed cables. Then, after letting consumers buy these cables for a year, they lay the whammy down and stop the cables from working right now.
Now many of us have dead cables that we can’t use, can’t sell and that we spent good money on. And many of these cables were not cheap and were not marked as not licensed. At minimum, Apple should be required to cable swap all consumer purchased now non-working unlicensed Lightning cables for an Apple licensed cable so we’re not out any money. It’s not the consumer’s fault Apple didn’t warn the consumer properly. It’s also not the consumer’s fault the manufacturer sold us an unlicensed cable. That fight is clearly between Apple and the cable manufacturer. Apple, take your fight to where it belongs.. between you and the manufacturer. Don’t take it out on the very customer that you depend upon to keep you in business. Not a smart move.
As a consumer, I simply want a fully working retractable cable without stupid warning messages or I want my money back. Apple, you clearly owe me a replacement cable for waiting a year to warn me thus losing my ability to return the cable.
IOS7: The New Android?
Note, apparently some readers think I do a lot of ranting. Sometimes I do. In this case, you better get prepared for a rant of epic proportions because here it comes.
White screens and borders, really?
Ok, so when I flipped open my iPad the first time on IOS7, I’m greeted by white screens (or nearly white screens). At first I wasn’t sure to make of it. Now, I’m quite sure. The white screens must go. If you’re trying to use the iPad in the dark, it’s like having a flashlight shining in your face. No, thanks.
Not only are the white screens extremely distracting, they’re hard on the eyes and there’s nothing quite like staring at the end of a flashlight when you’re sitting in the dark. No, bad idea. Worse, whatever happened to the light sensor? Come on Apple. You put the sensor on the unit, use the damned thing will you? If I’m in a low light environment, choose a background that complements the low light environment. If I’m in a high light environment, again, choose a brighter background to make the contrast stand out. I don’t need to be blinded in the dark and I don’t want to see a washed out screen when it’s bright outside.
Gag! the Calendar app has that white background with red letters by default. Red? Really?!? I may have to rethink my Calendaring again.Whatever happened to all of that great engineering that used to work at Apple? I think they’ve all gone to Android. Let’s put some thinking caps on shall we?
What’s worse than white screens?
I’ll answer that question.. It’s when the OS flips back and forth between black and white screens. So, now not only do you have blinding white screens with garish colored fonts staring you in the face, now iOS has to flip between the solid white screens to solid black screens. Sure, there’s this fade transition thing, but it’s still overbearing and unnecessary. This is, in my estimation, one of the absolute worst design practices I’ve ever seen from any company. Who would ever design any application where one screen is almost solid white and the next is almost solid black. This is the absolute antithesis of good design. No graphical designer of any merit would even hint at let alone pitch such a stark transition between two elements.
An OS should be about experiences that let you get your work done. Not experiences that distract you from that purpose. If anything, the OS should blend into the background and facilitate getting the work done. Instead, the OS practically waving a red flag in your face and saying, “Here, look at me”.
Photos App is absolutely broken
When you’re just viewing photos, there’s this annoying white bar at the top of the screen that covers over the top 10% of the image. What’s that all about? I mean, can’t Apple software engineers figure out how to properly scale an image so it can be fully visible on the screen without being covered over by menu bars?
If you try to set wallpaper with the Photos app by scaling or sizing an image, be prepared for the whole app to lock up and possibly even cause your whole iPad to spontaneously reboot. This app is seriously unstable. Was this software even remotely beta tested? Once again, come on Apple. I can understand if something like Bob’s app was borked up, but the Photos app is pretty much a necessity. This has to be fixed and pronto.
And, to top it off, when you can manage to get the app not to lock the whole blasted iPad up when moving and scaling, it pushes 30% of the image off the top of the screen with no way to correct it. What crap!
Background Image movement effect
That new live motion background thing is the most worthless use of extra CPU cycles I’ve seen yet. The short and sweet of it is, let me turn it off. Don’t care about, don’t want it, don’t need it. And, the affect is so small it’s just pointless. I move my iPad 10 inches back and forth and the background moves maybe 1 pixel. Stupid waste of resources.
Lock and Unlock sounds no longer work.
Nuff said. [UPDATE] I kind of figured this one out. After the update to iOS7, these sounds are inexplicably disabled. However, if you go into the Sounds area in settings, you can turn it off and back on. This at least enables the lock sound. It does appear, though, that Apple has stripped the unlock sound from the system.
Carnival Colors
Where are we, Google? Seriously. I don’t want garish colors shining in my face at practically every turn. Some of the colors are almost like fluorescent green colors. It’s like, bad and ugly all at the same time. I don’t mind the flat look, but these colors seriously need to be muted down a whole lot.
Android Clone
Apple just ripped a page out of the Android book with IOS7, especially when it comes to the so-called streamlined fonts. This OS looks and feels more like Android than any other OS I’ve seen. We already have an Android. We don’t need another one. Do something original Apple. After all, that’s what you used to be known for. If I wanted to buy an Android tablet, I’d go buy one. I don’t want my Apple product to look and feel like an Android tablet. Of course, now we just need to wait for Google to file a lawsuit against Apple.
I’m hoping that Apple can get this quickly derailing train back on track soon with 7.0.1 as this thing called IOS7 is a hot mess. … and I thought IOS6 was bad.
Lady Gaga: Pop culture turns sour
When Lady Gaga hit the scene, like most other early Shock Artists, she pinned herself to the genre of pop music. With songs like Just Dance and Poker Face, she set the tone (or at least we thought) of what she would continue to bring to the table. Let’s explore.
Early Gaga
In the early days of Lady Gaga, we saw an artist who, not unlike many past pop artists, turned to shock art antics on the stage. Artists who fit into this same mold include David Bowie, The Tubes, Alice Cooper, Madonna, Prince (for his sexcapades on stage), Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson and Tool. All of these bands had at least one pop hit.
Gaga has taken this same approach with The Fame. She cleverly uses straightforward pop music to rope in her fans. She then treats them to outrageous shock art antics both on stage and off, such as a raw meat dress and matching purse and hat. Or, her bubble outfit. She’s very good at both revealing parts of her body and covering them at the same time in a shocking way.
Her label hired a top-notch pop producer to produce The Fame as a classic pop album. In fact, the songs were very danceable with straightforward lyrics that most anyone can understand. Songs like Just Dance, Poker Face, Paparazzi and Love Game. She followed this album almost immediately with The Fame Monster and continued along these same lines changing the pop formula and song tone slightly, but retaining the straightforward pop lyrics with Telephone, Bad Romance and Monster. Although, by The Fame Monster, you could see hints of things to come, but it was still fun mostly pop music.
Later Gaga
With Born This Way, Lady Gaga took a decidedly different turn. This album saw a drastic change in compositions and lyrics. The music is less straightforward pop delving off into less pop formula at times. She’s now trying to push the envelope of the pop genre both musically and lyrically. Unfortunately, pop music has a very narrow range of formula and the boundaries cannot be pushed, not even by Lady Gaga. If you diverge from this narrow range in the pop genre, you are firmly outside of the genre. Meaning, Born This Way really wasn’t straightforward pop music. At best, it would be considered experimental pop. Born This Way (the album) just didn’t work as pop music as well as The Fame and The Fame Monster (and her charting of tracks from this release proved that).
By this time, though, Gaga had gained a large fanbase because of her two prior releases. Releases that were exceptionally produced and that had mass appeal. With Born This Way, she had to hope her existing fans would accept it. Thankfully, for her, they did. Unfortunately, Born This Way did little to rope in new fans as the appeal of the tracks on Born This Way would be limited.
Tracks such as Judas, Fashion of His Love and Marry The Night took a much more serious and darker tone, something which pop is generally not known for. The lyrics could be interpreted in ways that could be considered problematic by many. Unfortunately, this also means that Gaga has unpinned her roots to pop music with this release. Of course, Born This Way is her ‘second’ official album because The Fame Monster was an extension to The Fame. The fact that this album wasn’t as good follows with most artist’s sophomore releases.
Shock Art
For musical artists to utilize Shock Art properly, it requires grounding one piece of the persona to accepted social norms. For musicians, this means pinning the music and lyrics firmly to a common and popular music genre. Not only does this appear to ground the artist to some semblance of sanity, the shock art can be forgiven because of the quality music behind the shock. The pop genre also, when the music gets airplay, guarantees enough fans to continue to drive the artist forward.
Unfortunately, once Lady Gaga unpinned her music from the straightforward pop genre, she now risks losing everything she’s worked so hard to build. If people don’t listen to the music, the shock art has no place. People don’t go to the shows to see what’s on stage or watch the shock, they go to hear the music. The visuals simply come along as the frame around the music.
When you buy a painting, for example, you find a frame that suits the painting. You don’t buy some random gaudy frame that detracts from the art. You buy a frame that complements it. You buy a frame that guides your eyes into the picture and not to the frame itself. Without good music to back the shows, the only thing left to watch are the meat dresses and gooey concoctions she drapes herself in.
ARTPOP
Lady Gaga is releasing her new album ARTPOP on November 11th, 2013. One track has been ‘leaked’ called Burqa. Listening to this track, it’s clear that Gaga is pushing herself even farther away from the pop genre now more than ever. Some claim that it’s ‘club music’, but I don’t hear it. Club music is danceable. Club music has a beat that continues throughout the song. It is a 120-140 beats per minute track that gets people out of their seats and onto the dance floor. With Burqa, much of the song is devoid of beats. The sections that have beats still aren’t danceable.
The songwriting on the track is not pop formula. Most pop formula has a driving beat throughout with occasional breaks to heighten the track. Pop formula is usually ABAB or AABAABB or ABABBB similar. Where A is the straight sung parts of the song and B is the chorus or hook. Listening to Burqa, it’s difficult to find the formula because there’s not a driving beat and the chorus that’s there is not enough to get it stuck in your head. It’s structured, but not in the way that most pop songs are.
The point is that Gaga is now further pulling her music away from the pop genre and placing it into some kind of no-man’s land where it doesn’t fit rock, pop, dance or club. These types of tracks fit in the experimental category. Believe me, there are not many people out there who listen to experimental music. This genre is reserved for eclectic listeners. This is also not the demographic that tends to pay to attend concerts regularly. This is Lady Gaga’s primary mistake.
Gaga is washing herself out at a time when she could be firmly on top. Her label and her producers are not helping her either. They should be guiding her and keeping her on the pop track, but someone is giving her wrong advice (or no advice).
Ms. Germanotta, if you’re reading this, you need to head back to the studio and make sure your music remains firmly as ‘girl dumps guy’, ‘bad girl attitude’ lyrics wrapped in catchy pop tunes. This is the only way to ensure you can continue your rule at the top of pop no matter what you do on stage. The shock art may keep you in the tabloids, but the pop music keeps you on the charts and fans attending your concerts. Without The Pop, you won’t continue to have The Fame.
How not to run a business (Part 6): Coding Edition
So… you decide to open a business to write and sell software. Your business can choose from several different software development methodologies and strategies to help you get that software off the ground. You can choose the waterfall approach or use an agile approach. There are many approaches that can work, but all approaches have both benefits and drawbacks. Depending on the type of business your company is in, you need to think through how each type of coding method can affect your customer. Note that the goal behind most methods of development is to drive the process to completion, not so much to provide quality. With either Agile or Waterfall, both approaches can let you down if you’re not actively driving quality all along the way. Let’s explore.
Don’t choose a software development strategy just because you think it will allow you to complete the software on time. Any strategy you employ must make sure quality is number one or you face customer problems. Simply getting the software done and on time is not enough. Quality has to remain at the top for any software your team writes.
Don’t let your customers become guinea pigs. Software development is for your customers’ benefit. Thoroughly testing code is important. Don’t let this fall through the cracks or your customers will suffer the consequences and end up as beta testers.
Don’t employ only happy path programming efforts when writing code. Coding solely for the happy path leaves your customers vulnerable to the unhappy paths. Coding for happy path is equivalent to intentionally skipping big pieces of testing. Your customer will pay the price when they fall into an unhappy path trap. Your staff then has to respond by spending time doing data fixups, writing patches to fix holes missed and your sales/support teams will be on the phone to customers giving false reassurances.
Don’t miss crucial QA steps just because you ran out of time. If time is the most important thing when coding, then the code quality will suffer and and so will your customer. Again, do not use your customers as guinea pigs unless you like them walking away from your business.
Let’s understand more why the above is important!
The Happy Path is not happy for your customers. Utilizing Happy Path coding is solely for the convenience and benefit of your programmers in getting work done rapidly. Getting things done rapidly, but poorly is not good for your business or your customer. Happy Path software development simply doesn’t work.
As an example, imagine walking down a block in downtown NYC. You walk the block from corner to corner without any diversions or problems arising. Let’s call this the Happy Path. Now, let’s say you walk that walk again, but this time you stumble over a manhole and fall. You were so focused on the destination, you didn’t pay attention to the manhole cover that wasn’t fully closed. This is an unhappy path. Let’s say that the next time you walk this path, you know the manhole over isn’t fully closed and you avoid it. Except this time you were so focused on avoiding the manhole cover, you walk into a tree. Yet another unhappy path.
Now, imagine this is your customer. Each time they try to navigate down your Happy Path, they fall into one trap after another because your software doesn’t handle these pitfalls. Writing code solely for the Happy Path is definitely not your business friend. Your customers will become frustrated and eventually find another company with a more stable product. It doesn’t matter how good the features are, it matters that the software is stable. A customer places trust in your software, but that trust is broken when the software breaks often.
Coding for your customer
Your customer is the most important thing you have in your business. They drive your revenue and keep you in business. You should never play games with them and you should never use them as paid beta testers. But, writing code that only utilizes the Happy Path intentionally leads your customers and your company into unhappy pitfalls. Wouldn’t you rather have your team find these pitfalls before your customer does? When your customer finds the bug before you do, it makes your team and company look inept. This is never a good position to be in, especially when you are trying to establish yourself as high quality software company.
The Happy Path may only provide between 20-50% tested code paths. The other 50-80% is left to be tested by your customer while they pay for and use your product? The Happy Path only leads to unhappy customers. Instead, if your software developers test a Robust Path all along the way, your software should catch at least 80-90% of the bugs leaving very small percentage of edge case bugs for your customers to find. So, instead of having your team working on constant bug fixes and/or constantly fixing or restoring customer data, your team can focus on the next product release features. Unfortunately, customer fixups and customer phone calls over these issues are big time wasters. Wasted time that can be completely avoided by writing the code correctly the first time.
The reality is when writing software, your team can either spend their time on crash proofing code up front or spend even more time crash proofing the code after it’s already in production and making the customer unhappy. Either way, the problems will get fixed. It’s just that you, as a company owner, need to decide whether it’s more important to have happy satisfied customers or a fast development cycle. You can’t really have both. Customers become especially disenchanted when they’re paying a hefty fee to you for your service and end up beta testers. Customers are always expecting solid robust code. They don’t pay to be beta testers.
Customer Churn
Keeping the customer happy should always be your number one priority. Unfortunately, you can’t do that if the code that’s being written is crashing and generally providing a less than stellar experience to your customers. You have to decide if you want your team to spend their time bug-proofing the code or have even more of your staff spend their time after the release smoothing out customer dissatisfaction issues in combination with bug fixes. So, not only is your sales team’s and customer care team’s time spent making the customer happy again, your engineering team’s time is being incorrectly spent having to rewrite code a second, third or fourth time to fix bugs. Depending on your SLAs, you might even be violating these by having certain bugs.
This can mean at least three times more work created for your staff than simply having your developers write robust code from the beginning. Sure, it might require a month longer development cycle, a bigger QA test cycle, but that extra time will pay for itself in having happy satisfied paying customers and fewer customer incidents. Customer satisfaction keeps your development team focused on the next feature set, keeps your sales team focused on new sales and keeps your customer support team educating users about how to use your product. Quality is the key, not speed.
Bug Fixing after a Release
I’m not saying there won’t be bugs to fix or unhappy customers. Bugs will be found even if your team appears to write the most perfect code. However, writing high quality code from the beginning will drastically reduce the cycle of bug fixing and patches. This means making sure your development staff are all trained and knowledgeable about the languages they are required to use. Introducing new programming languages without proper training is a recipe for problems. Learning a new language on the go is the best way to write bad code. Properly trained engineers will usually provide much higher quality code. Don’t ignore the Quality Assurance team’s role in making sure they have a full and complete test suite and solid full test cases. Unit testing works okay for developers, but once the code is all assembled, it needs a full QA test suite.
Also, if your feature set doesn’t cover your customer’s needs properly, satisfaction can also drop. This can happen if your business is fighting bad code rather than listening to what your customers want. Of course, this is a somewhat separate issue which I will discuss in another installment.
Java
I want to take a moment to discuss using Java for applications. Using Java is, again, a convenience to support speed coding efforts. More and more companies want it done ‘fast’.
With more and more compressed timelines, too many people seem to think that writing software in Java is easy, quick and simple. This is a fallacy. It isn’t. While writing the code may appear simple at first glance, the whole JVM adds a huge level of operating complexity that engineers and management fail to understand or simply overlook. In theory, you should be able to deploy your .jar file and be done with it. It’s not that simple. The JVM has heap space sizing issues and garbage collection that can easily turn what seems reasonable code into a nightmare for your operations team to support and a nightmare your customers. Basically, the JVM is an unpredictable beast.
Let’s understand this better. The JVM tries to make coding simple and easy because it’s interpreted. That thinking is a trap. From a coding perspective, it does make coding a whole lot easier as there are lots of frameworks that can be used and code examples to be had. Unfortunately, nothing ever comes for free. There are always strings attached. Java does a whole lot of internal housekeeping so the coder doesn’t have to. This ease of writing the code is completely negated by the JVM itself. To help the coder to not deal with extra coding of freeing up variables and objects, the JVM takes care of all of that. But, the price paid is the Garbage Collector. So, instead, of coder doing this work in code, the Garbage Collector (GC) allegedly does this for you. We won’t even get into just how ugly and horrible the JVM logging is when you’re trying to determine what went wrong.
In reality, the GC can end up spending so much time doing all of this extraneous cleanup work that no actual code work gets done. The reasons behind this issue can range from bad java code (e.g., object leaks, memory leaks, file descriptor leaks, etc) to huge swings in memory usage (creating GB sized objects and freeing them up often). As Big Data is becoming more common place, the JVM really was not designed to properly handle Big Data objects strictly because of the overhead of the GC. That means you need to have someone who’s extremely knowledgeable about tweaking the JVM’s heap sizes, GC frequency and other tweakable parameters inside the JVM so that it doesn’t get into this condition. It also means much more precise monitoring to determine when it is in this condition.
In some Java use cases with big data, using Java may not even work. If you really need to move big data around fast, you should really consider a compiled language first.
In essence, the engineering team has now pushed the normal robust coding and cleanup work off onto the operations team to manage via the JVM container. Now the operations team have to become experts in JVM management through managing and tweaking Java to keep it properly tuned and working. Worse, they now have to understand the code to even begin to diagnose a root cause of failure. In other words, it requires your operations staff have a much higher level of knowledge about java, java coding and JVMs than when using languages that don’t require Java.
Using C, C++ or other compiled languages
Even though compiled languages can require a much longer development cycle and more explicit handling of objects, they do two things for your company: 1) Forces your development team to write better code and 2) Gets rid of interpreted languages (and containers). Even above the tremendous speed gain your application will see from being compiled, the operations overhead to manage the application is drastically reduced. Writing a UNIX daemon to handle an operational task might require a simple configuration file and a ‘service’ script to restart it. No knowledge of a JVM container, of GC or of heap sizes is required.
Memory usage is always a concern, but not in the same way as Java works. In fact, it’s far far simpler to both troubleshoot and manage compiled applications than it is to troubleshoot and manage JVM container apps. If a compiled app goes off the rails, you know for certain that it was the app that did it. If a JVM contained app goes off the rails, you don’t know if it was the app itself or the JVM container that spiraled out of control.
When a JVM contained app fails, you’re left trying to determine if it was a bug in your company’s code running in the container, if it was a bug in Oracle’s Java version itself or if it was a third party component problem. This leaves too many variables to try and diagnose at once. With compiled languages, this troubleshooting is almost always far less ambiguous and is usually as simple as ‘strace’, ‘top’ or reviewing a core dump.
Business Choices
Whatever approach your team chooses, quality must remain number one. When quality is sacrificed for the sake of development speed, your customers will suffer and, in turn, so will the bottom line. Some customers may be willing to deal with a bug occasionally. But, if bugs are continual and constant after every release, eventually they will go find another service. Stability and reliability are the key to making sure your company continues to succeed no matter whether your company provides an iPad app or if your company intends to become the next Google. Innovation keeps your customers coming back from more, but you can’t innovate if your team is constantly fighting bad code.
← Part 5 | Chapter Index | Part 7 →
Yahoo: When recycling is not a good idea
After Marissa Mayer’s team recently decimated Flickr with its new gaudy and garish interface and completely alienated professional photographers in the process, her team is now aiming its sights on a new, but unnecessary, problem: recycling of long expired user IDs. Yahoo had been collecting user IDs for years. That is, people sign up and use the account for a while, then let the account lapse without use for longer than 30 days. Yahoo marks the ID as ‘abandoned’ (or similar) and then locks it out forever, until now. Some employee at Yahoo offered up the incredibly bad idea to recycle IDs. Unfortunately, this decision to recycle IDs may actually become the demise of Yahoo. Let’s explore.
Recyclables
I’m guessing that Yahoo has decided to make it look like it’s doing something good by recycling something, anything. That is, Yahoo is now letting people Wishlist long-closed user IDs that had been previously locked. Hurry, though, you only have until Aug 7, 2013 to wishlist that long forgotten ID. The trouble is, these old abandoned IDs are clearly second-hand goods. Let’s understand what exactly that means and why you really don’t want one (unless, of course, it was previously yours).
1) Obviously… Spam
Clearly, you aren’t asking for this old ID so you can jump onto that horrendous new Flickr interface or because you intend to read Yahoo News or OMG. The most obvious reason to want that ‘primo’ ID is for the email address. Unfortunately, you have no idea how that account was formerly used or what baggage might be associated with it! So, unfortunately, you will have no idea what exactly you’re getting into by re-using someone’s old ID. The person might have signed up for it just to divert tons of spam into it. Yes, this happens. That means, you could open the account and find it filled with spam in only 5-10 minutes, literally. Who’s to say someone wasn’t using it for illegal purposes and it was shut down for that purpose?
Yeah yeah.. Yahoo claims they will ‘unsubscribe’ the old ID from newsletters and so forth and these will have been ‘idle’ for at least 12 months (the first batch), but they’ve outlined no way in which they plan to accomplish this unsubscribe piece. Are they really going to hire a bunch of people to sit around clicking unsubscribe links and filling out unsubscribe forms? I think not. It’s all song and dance with no substance. Not to mention unsubscribing legitimate email subscriptions only accounts for about half (or less) of the total email volume that ends up in an inbox. So, don’t expect any miracles from Yahoo. If they can stop email, the best they can stop is about 40-50% at most. All of the rest will still show up merely by you having signed into your ‘new’ account.
A new email header?
Oh yeah, Yahoo is also trying to rush through the IETF RFC process a new header called require-recipient-valid-since that takes a date as an argument. This header basically requires marketers to know the exact acquisition date of every email address in their lists. Assuming email marketers know this date, which is a huge and incorrect assumption for Yahoo to make, when the email marketers send email containing this date, the email will supposedly end up in the correct account (or not) depending on the date. Because of this date header, that could lead real email to go missing or spam to show up. Unfortunately, as I said, this is an incorrect assumption. Most email marketers barely know the source of their leads, let alone when they acquired it. No, this date thing simply won’t work. And even then, this header will only work with email marketers willing to follow the rules. Spammers that don’t care won’t bother.
Worse, Yahoo is planning on handing out these newly freed old accounts in mid-August. Like every email marketing firm will simply drop whatever business plans they currently have to retool their applications to support this rushed and nearly useless header. Is Yahoo really that asleep at the switch?
2) Fraud, Account and/or Identity Theft
If you happened to have owned one of these long abandoned accounts or you otherwise lost your Yahoo account long ago, you’ll want to be very careful here. You can be guaranteed that there are already people scouting for popular long dead accounts to resurrect and phish for accounts, theft and identities. These thieves know that banks and other legacy institutions keep email addresses on file until you explicitly change them. Even then, they can have issues even updating this information in their systems even when you do request the change. So, someone who obtains a long dead account and then browses to Wells Fargo or Bank of America’s web site to request a password reset, they could abscond with your account credentials and your money assuming you still have (or ever had) any old Yahoo accounts hooked up to any financial accounts.
Yahoo claims to have ‘security’ mechanisms planned, but good luck with relying on that. I can’t even see that working. Granted, if banks fill in ‘require-recipient-valid-since’ with the appropriate acquisition date in every email they send, the banks can help prevent this issue (assuming the header works as expected). But, that also assumes the bank has an email address acquisition date to fill in this header. That also assumes that the bank can even roll out this header change in the time allotted before Yahoo starts doling these old IDs out. The clock is ticking and Yahoo hasn’t even gotten the RFC completed.
Fraud and identity theft is a very likely outcome of recycling old Yahoo accounts. If you’re reading this article and you have ever used a now-long-closed Yahoo ID for email, I urge you to go through all of your important accounts and make sure you have deleted all references to your old Yahoo email address immediately! Otherwise, some random person could come to own your old ID and can then cycle through sites requesting password resets just to find what sites your old ID may have used. This is the number one security threat that Yahoo can’t easily get around or easily address. Note, that a hacker who obtains an old ID only needs to get access to one of your accounts that will email your real plaintext password back to them and then they’ll work their way up to your bigger accounts. This is one of the biggest reasons this is an incredibly bad idea from Yahoo.
I’d also suggest that for any accounts you do have (i.e., Facebook, Gmail, etc), make sure to add alternative email addresses other than your Yahoo address for password resets and other security related emails. If you can, remove all your Yahoo addresses outright even if they are live. Use Gmail or Windows Live Mail instead (at least until they decide to go down this stupid ID recycling road).
3) Yahoo Mistakes
Ooops.. we didn’t actually intend to give away your live account. Sorry, ’bout that.
And then you’re stuck without an account. Yahoo is not publishing what accounts are under consideration specifically. They only say that these ‘dead accounts’ have been idle longer than 12 months in the first batch. Thereafter, any account that has been not accessed for 30 days is up for reissue consideration. There is nothing to say that Yahoo won’t make a mistake and re-issue a live and active account to some random person wbo signed up on the Wishlist. I can easily see this becoming one of the biggest blunders that Yahoo makes in this process. Unless the Yahoo staff is incredibly careful with this process, it would be super easy to accidentally give some random schmo access to an active live Yahoo account by mistake. For this reason alone, I’d consider closing out all of my Yahoo accounts except for one thing. They would recycle my account string name in 12 months (0r 30 days) and I’d be right back here in this situation again worrying about what of my other accounts were tied to this email address.
Basically, I can’t close my Yahoo account because it’s too great of a security risk. If I leave it open, I risk Yahoo accidentally giving it away in this stupid ‘wishlist’ process. It’s really a no-win situation. After Flickr, I have less and less trust in Yahoo and this is now leaving every Yahoo user in the lurch. This basically means you can NEVER EVER close your active Yahoo account if you want to keep your other accounts secure.
4) Missing Email
Even if you do manage to get your hands on one of these ‘prized’ IDs, Yahoo claims to be putting technical measures into place to prevent security issues. That could very well mean that for recycled accounts your mail delivery will be spotty, if it even works. Meaning, Yahoo may so heavily scrutinize emails heading to these recycled IDs that legitimate mail may simply never show up that’s been marked as ‘a security risk’. So, for emails like password resets to accounts, you may find that these emails simply never show up at all. Basically, anything that Yahoo’s email system construes as a security risk could simply just go missing. This is the most likely outcome of this recycling. Note that this problem could end up extending to every Yahoo account which could make Yahoo Mail a very problematic place for any email purposes.
Excess Baggage?
If after reading the above, you are still considering an ‘old used account’, I really can’t understand why. Taking on someone else’s old email and Yahoo baggage isn’t something I’d want to deal with (are they going to be sure to clear off all old comments and Yahoo answers for this old ID?). So, someone pops up from years past not knowing that Yahoo ID has been reissued and then you get some old boyfriend email, or someone who hated the previous owner of that ID. Then what? So, then you’ll be left with a mess to clean up. Why would you want to deal with this excess baggage when you can get a new account that’s never been issued and not have to deal with this problem at all? However, knowing that any account you create at Yahoo would be recycled later, how could you rely on it for any kind of security? You can’t. So, I might suggest Gmail or Windows Live Mail (or any other free email service not recycling IDs) instead of Yahoo.
Alternatives?
Unfortunately, I don’t see any other alternatives with Yahoo at this point. This is an incredibly stupid decision from Yahoo. I have no idea what the folks at Yahoo are even thinking. It’s not like a telephone number. You give that up and no one thinks twice that someone could use that old phone number nefariously. Unfortunately, nearly every site now uses email addresses to know if you ‘own’ your accounts. So, password resets, pin codes, and all manner of secure information traverses through email addresses.
One thing that Yahoo may inadvertently cause from this change is for Banks and other financial institutions to rethink how they validate a user’s identity. Clearly with this change, email addresses can no longer be trusted as secure or even know that it’s owned by only one person. This throws security surrounding email addresses into complete turmoil for any site that uses email addresses as validation.
Based on the previous paragraph, sites may start preventing use of @yahoo.com email addresses for their services. Knowing that you could lose your Yahoo account and then have it turned over to someone else 30 days later could easily lead to site compromises. To simply avoid this situation entirely, sites that rely on security may simply stop letting @yahoo.com email addresses sign up for service. So, one of the biggest benefits of using Yahoo Mail will end. I’d expect a mass exodus to Gmail or Windows Live Mail after the dust settles here. In fact, this decision may kill Yahoo Mail as any kind of a real email service. Does Marissa have any idea what the hell she’s doing? If I were on the Yahoo board, I’d be seriously considering right about now of ousting this one.
If I were in a position at Yahoo to make this decision, I would have killed this idea before I’d ever left the conference room. That Yahoo is even contemplating making this move at this time is completely questionable. Let’s just hope that when someone’s account is compromised and/or has identity theft as a direct result of this bad Yahoo decision, that someone will sue the pants off of Yahoo. That will at least teach other ISPs that this is not, in any way, an acceptable practice.
Risky Business
This decision has disaster written all over it. This is also a huge liability risk for Yahoo. Yes, Yahoo may have written in their Terms and Conditions that they have the right to reissue account names. But, since they hadn’t been doing this from the beginning and they’re now choosing to do this without proper preparations, this is a huge legal risk. It only takes a handful of users who’s accounts get compromised or who’s identities get stolen as a result of Yahoo’s new policy that this will end in courtroom dates. I can’t even fathom what benefit Yahoo derives from reissuing old IDs, but I can definitely see huge legal liabilities and black clouds looming over this now floundering company. In fact, the liabilities so outweigh the potential benefits to Yahoo, I have to completely question the purpose of this decision. Let’s hope Yahoo is all lawyered up as I can see the court dates piling up from this very very bad decision.
Microsoft Surface: Why Windows is not ready for a tablet
Microsoft always tries to outdo Apple, but each time they try they end up with a half-baked device that barely resembles what Apple offers. Worse, the device barely even understands the purpose of why Apple created their product in the first place or even what space it fills in the market. But, leave it to Microsoft to try. Let’s begin.
Microsoft Surface
I’ve recently come into contact with a Microsoft Surface tablet. Let’s just dive right into the the heart of the problems with this platform. Windows and a touch surface are simply not compatible, yet. Why? We have to understand Window 8. For the release of Windows 8, Microsoft introduced Metro. This interface is a big tile based interface that is, more or less, touch friendly. It’s the interface that was adopted for use on both the Xbox 360 and Windows phones. The difference between Windows phone / Xbox 360 and Windows 8 is that you can’t get to the underlying Windows pieces on the Xbox 360 and Windows phone (and that’s actually a good thing). With Windows 8 on a tablet, unfortunately, you can. In fact, it forces you to at times. And, here’s exactly where the problems begin.
Windows 8 under the hood is basically Windows 7 slightly repackaged. What I mean is that Windows 8 is essentially Windows 7 when not using Metro. So, the window close button and resize button are the same size as Windows 7, the icons are the same size, the tiny little triangle next to a folder hierarchy is the same size. Easily clickable with a mouse. Now, imagine trying to activate one of those tiny little icons with a tree trunk. You simply can’t target these tiny little icons with your finger. It’s just not touch friendly. That’s exactly the experience you get when you’re using the Windows 8 desktop interface. When trying to press the close button on the Window, yet you might have to press on the screen two, three or four times just to hit the tiny little control just to make it activate. It’s an exercise in futility and frustration.
Metro and Windows
Metro is supposed to be the primary interface to drive Microsoft Surface. However, as soon as you press some of the tiles, it drops you right into standard Windows desktop with icons, start button and all. When you get dropped into this interface, this is exactly where the whole tablet’s usefulness breaks down. Just imagine trying to use a touch surface with Windows 7. No, it’s not pretty. That’s exactly what you’re doing when you’re at the Windows 8 desktop. It’s seriously frustrating, time consuming and you feel like a giant among Liliputians.
No, this interface is just not ready for a touch surface. At least, not without completely redesigning the interface from the ground up… which, in fact, is what I thought Metro would become. But no, many of the activities on the Metro screen take you out of Metro. This is the breakdown in usability. For a tablet OS, Metro should be it. There should be no underlying Windows to drop down to. If you can’t do it Metro, it cannot be done!
A Tablet is not a home computer, Microsoft!
The offering up multiple interfaces to the operating system is the fundamental design difference between IOS and Windows 8. Microsoft would have been smarter to take Windows phone OS and place that operating system straight onto Windows Surface. At least that operating system was completely designed to work solely with touch screen using 100% Metro. That would have been at least more along the lines of what Surface should have been. Instead, Microsoft decides to take the entire Windows 8 operating system and place it onto the tablet, touch-unfriendly and all. Is anyone actually thinking in Redmond?
In addition, putting full versions of Word, Powerpoint and Excel on Windows Surface might seem like a selling point, but it isn’t. The point to the iPad is to provide you with small lightweight applications to supplement what you use on a full computer. Or, better, Cloud versions of the apps. I understand the thinking that having a full computer as a tablet might be a good idea, but it really isn’t. Tablets are way too under powered for that purpose. That’s why notebooks and desktops are still necessary. The size of the processors in flat tablet devices just aren’t powerful enough to be useful for full-sized apps. That’s the reason why the iPad is the way that it is. Apple understands that an A6 processor is not in any way close to a full quad core i7 processor. So, the iPad doesn’t pretend to be a full computer knowing that it can’t ever be that. Instead, it opts to provide smaller light weight apps that allow simple communication, entertainment and apps that an A6 is capable of handling within the constraints of the limited ram and storage. That’s why IOS works on the iPad and why Windows 8 doesn’t work on Microsoft Surface.
Herky Jerky Motion
One of the other problems I noticed is that when you’re dragging around Metro’s interface and transitioning between Windows 8 desktop apps and back into Metro, there is this annoying stuttering jerky motion the screen does. It appears that this was an intentional design and not the graphics card going haywire. I’m not sure why this was let out of Redmond this way. Just from that problem alone, I first thought that Microsoft Surface tablet was having a problem. Then I realized that it wasn’t a tablet hardware problem. Indeed, that problem was inherent within Windows 8 and Metro. If you’re planning to offer a dragging, fading, transitioning experience, make it smooth. That means, no jerky shaky transitions. It makes the device seem under powered (it probably is). At the same time, it makes Windows look antiquated and unpolished (it definitely is).
Multiple Revisions
Microsoft always takes two or three product iterations before it settles into a reasonably solid, but second rate, product format. With the exception of the original Xbox, I don’t know of any single device that Microsoft has gotten right on the first try. It was inevitable that they would get the Microsoft Surface tablet wrong. If you’re looking to get into Windows 8, I’d suggest just going for a notebook outright. You’ll get more for your bang for the buck and you’ll have a much more usable Windows 8 experience.
I really wanted to like Windows Surface, but these fundamental problems with Windows prevent this tablet from being anything more than a clunky toy. The iPad actually has a use because the icons and screen elements are always big enough to tap no matter the size of the device. This is one of things that Apple fully understands about touch surfaces. Although, Apple could do with some nuanced improvements to touch usability. Unfortunately, when you get to the Windows 8 desktop interface, it’s a complete chore to control it via touch. I just can’t see buying a Windows Surface first version tablet. It tries to be too many things, but fails to be any of them.
Microsoft, figure it out!
Random Thoughts - Randocity! 
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