The Lesson of Microsoft's Tay

Interesting article posted on ZDNet. It has several thoughful ideas in it that really can apply to research.

1) Customers wants are a lagging indicator of the Market.

Part of it was listening to customers, which works best when there isn't an inflection point in technology going on. Microsoft enterprise customers would tell the company they couldn't digest new versions of software every year; two years or three years or five or seven or even every decade was as often as they could cope with change. As late as 2011, according to 'father of SharePoint' Jeff Teper, the Office team was waiting for customers to tell them when it was time to be in the cloud - but those customers weren't even considering it. After one meeting, he realised "our customers were going to be a trailing indicator on the market, that the IT people in the room were not going to tell us when the market had turned, they were going to tell us after it turned."

2) It's hard to predict what customers will do with technology.

Microsoft hasn't been good at predicting what customers would do with software. That's true across the technology industry, and sometimes it's a good thing. Wi-fi wasn't designed for ubiquitous connectivity; the street, as author William Gibson famously said in Burning Chrome, finds its own uses for things.

3) You need to experiment. Think about the worse that can happen; Red team it to find something worse. Mitigate it and then Experiment.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-lesson-of-microsofts-tay-ai-chatbot-experiments-are-hard-but-worth-it/