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Microsoft has been quietly building a platform to help its own product teams -- and ultimately, those from other companies -- turn product planning more of a science and less of a black art.

Mary Jo Foley, ZDnet, Apr 16, 2008.

Microsoft calls the test bed the Microsoft Experimentation Platform (ExP).

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The chief experimenter behind this initiative is General Manager Ronny Kohavi. Kohavi joined Microsoft in 2005 from Amazon.com. At Amazon, he was the director of data mining and personalization. He joined Microsoft�s Natural and Interactive Services Division (NISD) to build a system that would map user activities to intent using machine-learning algorithms.

"In the first few months, I realized that few tools existed at Microsoft to run live experiments and make data-driven decisions based on user actions," Kohavi told me, via e-mail. "I was being asked to build something with limited ability to iterate quickly and test ideas with controlled experiments, so my initial reaction was to build a small system to run controlled experiments within my project."

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