Information Retrieval Gupf

Via @glinden, I enjoyed this article on why GDrive (an early cloud document/file store) was never launched by Google:

At the time [2008], Google was about to launch a project it had been developing for more than a year, a free cloud-based storage service called GDrive. But Sundar [Pichai] had concluded that it was an artifact of the style of computing that Google was about to usher out the door. He went to Bradley Horowitz, the executive in charge of the project, and said, “I don’t think we need GDrive anymore.” Horowitz asked why not. “Files are so 1990,” said Pichai. “I don’t think we need files anymore.”

Pichai apparently went on to explain in more detail why files are no longer needed.  It has to do with the notion that, in the cloud you just have data and information.  Organizing that information into files is not necessary, especially when you can just start editing that information directly in Google Docs.  I’m going to ignore for a moment the “don’t be evil” ramifications of data portability and lock-in that comes through the dissolution of explicit files — how am I supposed to export my data into the Microsoft Cloud Word or into Open Office or into VisiWord whatever else I’d like to use, if files do not exist?  Instead, I’m going to focus on how this decision was arrived at:

When Pichai first proposed this concept to Google’s top executives at a GPS—no files!—the reaction was, he says, “skeptical.” [Linus] Upson had another characterization: “It was a withering assault.” But eventually they won people over by a logical argument—that it could be done, that it was the cloudlike thing to do, that it was the Google thing to do. That was the end of GDrive: shuttered as a relic of antiquated thinking even before Google released it. The engineers working on it went to the Chrome team.

This is what I find absolutely fascinating.  Here is a company that A/B tests everything in a heavily data driven manner, down which of 41 shades of blue the link anchortext should be.  So you would think that such a momentous decision about killing the whole GDrive project would be data driven.  It was not.  I quote again:

But eventually they won people over by a logical argument—that it could be done, that it was the cloudlike thing to do, that it was the Google thing to do.

Here is an instance where an important decision potentially very large service was made not by the data, but by a HiPPO, the highest-paid person in the room.   Continue reading →

I came across an interesting blogpost today, entitled “The Paradox of Choice is Not Robust“.  To requote their quote:

Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided (with Peter Todd and, later, Rainer Greifeneder) to design a range of experiments to figure out when choice demotivates, and when it does not.

But a curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why.

After designing 10 different experiments in which participants were asked to make a choice, and finding very little evidence that variety caused any problems, Scheibehenne and his colleagues tried to assemble all the studies, published and unpublished, of the effect.

The average of all these studies suggests that offering lots of extra choices seems to make no important difference either way.

I’ll let that speak for itself, and will note only a few of my related blog posts from a year+ ago: Google Search Options and the Paradox of Choice and Ranked Lists and the Paradox of Choice.