Monday, November 24 
Good article in the New York Times about Netflix’ competition it’s been running the last couple of years to improve its recommendation engine. Hundreds of people have tried to win the $1 million on offer, but no-one has yet cracked the 10% improvement barrier that Netflix has set. In other words, the contestants have to improve the quality of suggestions that Netflix makes to its members based on their previous ratings by 10%.
There are many reasons why this is difficult to do, attested by the asymptotically slowing rate of improvement. One class of movies is particularly tricky - those which are love-it-or-hate-it in nature. Napoleon Dynamite epitomizes this category - Netflix and the contestants have a terrible time predicting whether someone will like it or not based on their past track record.
People go through phases in buying things, and our multiple personalities come out in what we buy and enjoy. We are not (entirely) self-consistent, logical beings.
Even so, it sometimes seems like recommendation engines just seem to miss the boat. By all rights, Amazon should be able to make highly accurate recommendations to me about all sorts of things, given the amount of stuff I’ve bought there, yet it is incredibly inaccurate. It keeps recommending products that I’ve already bought (e.g. I just bought one digital camera so it immediately recommends another - why would I need two?) or which are off-base in the long term (I buy a gift for a baby shower, and it throws all its reco’s off).
ny times, amazon, netflix, recommendation engine, social software, search, clive thompson | IN CATEGORIES... Technology, User Experience, Software, Innovation Sunday, October 12 An article in Sunday’s NY Times about the tug of war between eBay and Amazon, which Amazon is currently winning, contains this great quote from Jeff Bezos
Our willingness to be misunderstood, our long-term orientation and our willingness to repeatedly fail are the three parts of our culture that make doing this kind of thing possible.
This crisply summarizes three key mindsets that are essential to thriving with innovation on a consistent basis: don’t listen to your customers literally, have strategic patience, and be willing to make mistakes (as long as you learn from them).
I’ve criticized Amazon in the past for loading too much stuff onto its pages, and that is still the case, and often it seems driven by a corporate case of attention-deficit-disorder. (Sergey Brin has realized that Google has some of the same problem, and is trying to create more focus.) But to its credit, Amazon has not given up trying to innovate, and has clearly embedded that drive into the organization.
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google, innovation, management, amazon, jeff bezos, yahoo, ebay, innovation process | IN CATEGORIES... Business, Strategy, Innovation, Management