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Bill Gates on “quality experience”
From: Bill Gates
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2000 3:02 PM
To: Will Poole
Cc: Jim Allchin; Eric Rudder
Subject: Quality experience and streaming media
I don’t know how unique I am but my experience in clicking on streaming media stuff and seeing if it works is still less than 50%.
For example the MSN home page talk about a golf match going on called the President’s cup. I click on that and then I click on this link:
http://stream1.iims.intelonline.com/ViewWeb/Quokka_Presidents_Cup/File/101700192418001.rm
I get a message saying: “This document is not a RealAudio or RealVideo Document” “This is error 11. To learn more go to a real URL.
This is so typical. I always get error messages when I click on Audio and Video.
Just for fun I go to the home page and grab an MSNBC video clip:
<http://go.msn.com/CM/10002/default.asp?target=http://www.msnbc.com/m/c/ct_hmcvideo.asp%3Fid%3Dnn_fletcher_israel_001018%26sl%3D468764>
I click and bizarrely I get a browser page and a video page - the lack of integration of the browser and the player is crazy.
The browser page is fine but the video says buffering and 5 minutes later nothing has happened.
We should go on a quality campaign. We should really collect error message reports from our servers.
Something is very hard to set up or hard to track in this area. The quality is giving us a bad name.
I guess I can keep sending all my failures along - the key point is that I haven’t seen any improvement.
I have yet to have a good video experience.
[This document is from Comes v. Microsoft (2007).]
Previously: Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker (January 15, 2003)
Microsoft exec: Here’s why Apple isn’t interested in replacing Google with Bing
From: Jon Tinter
To: Yusuf Mehdi; Satya Nadella; Neal Bernstein; Harry Shum; Brian MacDonald; Erik Jorgensen; Rik van der Kool
CC: Stephen Lawler; Andrew Shuman; Mike Nichols; Jon Tinter
Sent: 11/5/2009 4:43:26 AM
Subject: RE: Apple Update
I think that we all agree that the goal with Apple is to become the default search on iPhone. This is the position that has the most value. The challenge is how to achieve that goal.
Apple has made it very clear to us that they are not interested in replacing G as the default search provider. This position is in spite of all of the challenges in the relationship between Apple and G. I think that this is a function of three things:
Apple generates significant revenue from G today
Concern that replacing G with Bing (which is still low share and generally unproven in the market despite our early momentum) represents a significant customer experience risk
Apathy/antipathy at Apple towards MS
They have made this position very clear to us both in the discussion with Phil Schiller and in the subsequent conversation with their team.
[This document is from U.S. v. Google (2024).]
Mark Zuckerberg: “Snapchat analytics”
From: Mark Zuckerberg
Sent: Thursday, June 9, 2016 8:47 AM
To: Javier Olivan, Alex Schultz
Cc: Chris Cox
Subject: Snapchat analytics
Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them.
Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.
[This document is from Klein v. Meta (2024).]
Further reading from Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai for TechCrunch (March 26, 2024):
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. Facebook called this “Project Ghostbusters,” in a clear reference to Snapchat’s ghost-like logo. […]
Facebook’s engineers solution was to use Onavo, a VPN-like service that Facebook acquired in 2013. In 2019, Facebook shut down Onavo after a TechCrunch investigation revealed that Facebook had been secretly paying teenagers to use Onavo so the company could access all of their web activity.
After Zuckerberg’s email, the Onavo team took on the project and a month later proposed a solution: so-called kits that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific subdomains, “allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage,” read an email from July 2016. “This is a ‘man-in-the-middle’ approach.”
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