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Gates didn't get the Zipf distribution |
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Contributed by Curt Wehrley
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Wednesday, 28 December 2005 |
In Microsoft and the Long Tail of Search, Chris discusses the email he received from a former senior Microsoft manager (name withheld), who described the difficult time he had explaining the Zipf distribution to Bill and his executive team. The manager goes on to tell how he explained the curve, and provided a helpful rule-of-thumb for estimating the consequences of this distribution. I encourage you to read the entire post, found here. BTW, the title of this post isn't meant to be a Bill-bashing. The point is that this distribution shows up practically everywhere in business, and even household names like Microsoft have a tough time grasping its implications. This Zipf thing isn't new in the tech world, either: Web page usability guru Jakob Nielsen was blogging here in 1997 about how Web use follows a Zipf distribution.
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