In 2010, former Google product managers Dan Siroker and Pete Koonen launched Optimizely, which was their deeply thought-out solution to this problem. Optimizely couldn't launch better tests than Google, but it did provide a graphic interface to run and manage the tests.

All marketers had to do was install a single line of javascript on their site. They could then click on anything they wanted to change on a WYSIWYG editor instead of staring blankly at lines of code.

The number of steps it took to A/B test-from turning to an engineer, pointing out the elements of your web page that you wanted to test, and having them insert script tags for each-was drastically cut down.

Optimizely thought deeply about the problem, and solved some of the hard technical problems behind building a WYSIWYG.

Marketers were suddenly able to run many types of experiments on their own, and all the A/B testing tools you see today solve the problem in the way that Optimizely did first. Six years later, Optimizely still has the lion's share of the market.