Most of us, especially in the software industry, are data driven by nature. Given that propensity, I’m surprised by how few applications are purposely instrumented to provide real, hard data about how they are functioning.

This is one area where Microsoft does a very good job. Most Microsoft applications generate “Watson” data - information captured whenever an application has a problem. Subject to your personal privacy settings, that information is sent over the web to Microsoft so it can be analyzed, which hopefully results in the application being improved.

At blist, we’re doing similar things. We instrument the application to tell us things that we could potentially just ask you voice to voice. But we can produce better, more comprehensive and accurate answers simply by measuring it from within the application.

For example, we measure whenever anyone starts to import a CSV file but abandons the process before completion. We now know with certainty that we have more work to do in this area because we’re seeing that an unacceptable and unhealthy percentage of CSV imports are abandoned. Is the process too slow? Are we failing to provide enough feedback as the import progresses? Are we choking on big files? Are we having problems with the data in some kinds of files? These are the kinds of questions that can best be answered by instrumenting the application to tell us with certainty. And that’s exactly what we are doing. Look for the CSV import process to improve over the upcoming weeks as we analyze the operational data our application generates.

12 or 15 years ago a boss of mine gave me some investing advice. He suggested that as I was an early evaluator of technology, the things that I was choosing to buy for my company were likely the things that other people in similar roles at other companies would eventually choose to buy. If I chose a product that was produced by a publicly traded company whose stock price didn’t yet reflect these anticipated sales, it might be a good idea to buy the company’s stock. I heeded this advice successfully over the years.

Last night my wife and I were at a charity auction held to benefit my kindergartener’s elementary school. I think I observed an interesting social indicator. At these events, there’s both a silent auction and a live auction. For the silent auction, an item is placed on a table for viewing and if you’re interested, you fill in your bidder number into the next available bid slot. The bid sheet discloses the real value of the product (as you can only declare a charitable deduction for the amount in excess of the value of the item). Typically the minimum bid is somewhere around 25% of the value and often the winning bidder pays well above the real value (this is, after all, a charity event to help the school raise funds for playground equipment, field trips and teaching specialists). Most people don’t mind overpaying for a good cause, not to mention there’s plenty of wine flowing to get people into the spirit and loosen up their checkbooks.

The interesting phenomena I observed is that two items had no bidders - tickets to a Seattle Sonics game and a retail copy of Windows Vista. Hmm. What does that say? Nobody wants these items even at 25% of their real value! For the Sonics tickets, I think most of us have written the Sonics off. We’ve resigned to the idea that they’re moving to Oklahoma. Nobody bidding on Vista actually surprised me. The retail value was either $499 or $599 and not one person had bid at the minimum level of $50.

Here we are in Seattle, in Microsoft’s own stomping grounds, and no one wants Vista. Ouch. I think it’s time to sell my Microsoft stock.