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Mo' Beta Testing Blues
theodp writes "Wired picks up on the observation made by Jason Fried that more and more sites and tools are launching and remaining in 'beta' mode. Prominent sites like Google News, A9, Froogle, Friendster, Tribe, and Orkut all sport 'Beta' disclaimers. Is this to get users to do the testing, a subtle way of saying 'don't expect support', or simply a marketing ploy to generate buzz by making users feel 'exclusive'?"
Maybe it signifies, like in the case of my site Slashster, that it actually IS in alpha.
The problem, I think, is what companies consider to be alpha / beta / whatnot. Alpha is when a product is still in development / testing. Beta is when the project is feature complete, and all that's going on is bugfixing.
Sites like Friendster, Tribes, Orkut, Slashster, do not have a concrete definition of "complete". There's always more functionality to add, always stuff to incorperate, and is ever-evolving. Therefore, it never gets out of alpha / beta phase.
As for my site, as long as there's no true commercial interest within my work, it will most likely stay as "alpha." Not to say that people shouldn't expect support, but rather that they shouldn't expect things to necessarily work either ;)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I opted into the "new and improved" eBay 2.0. There was a way to opt out at first, but ebay took that option away and locked it's users into using eBay 2.0. eBay then offered "workshops" to let users give their input, and after reading pages and pages of people screaming they want to be able to switch back to the older version, they just seemed to ignore them and answer questions related to how they could improve the atrocious interface of their new monster. Ebay seemed to lose a few buyers, and even some of their power-sellers because they would not give us back the link to opt out of eBay 2.0. So now I'm stuck with eBay 2.0, with no way to opt out. All I can say is that I'm glad I don't sell much because I heard it can be a pain in the ass now. :)
More information about eBay's workshops can be found at....
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/marketing.shtml
This is the era following "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", guys. Remember "release early and release often"? Of course they are soliciting users as beta testers. Microsoft does that all the time. And of course it is a marketing ploy. May I suggest a third option: compare this to the way that Doom was first released. This way of releasing is not only meant to make people feel exclusive or valued, it is also a way of gaining mind share (==market share) before the actual product is even released. Wake up, this is the 21st century Internet :)
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
well, there used to be a custom (there still is?) that a bridge would be beta tested by a line of trucks filled with sand, with the main engineer sitting _under_ the bridge.
:)
how's that for developer responsibility?
Time for me to go a/c.
Some new air-traffic control software went live in the Munich area just before christmas. The controllers who had to use it went bananas and their protests made German television.
One bug I remember: when planes land they can no longer be tracked by radar - doh - surprise! The software sometimes had them heading off the radar screen at mach 2.
Another: the system died and had to be rebooted. When it came back up again, all aircraft were in the system twice. One controller threatened someone involved in switching the system online again with physical violence.
When it comes to software, everything's beta in a sence. It's always under development. Since when does a company release software and then just stop development but still consider it active? Operating systems are always being updated and do so automatically. Windows has been in beta since version 1. Linux is in beta and is updated constantly. When I buy a car, it's not beta. It's complete and I don't expect Toyota so fedex me a better steering wheel every month. Software is intangible so by nature it can be updated constantly.
To me, beta always signified that a company was to release the software soon and I could get a "preview" for free. However, as the article points out, marketting departments are trying to alter the definition of the word to suit them. I don't know if this is good or bad, it's just more marketting.
its beta. Boss: why isn't this done? Employee: uh, its beta. Boss: very good. carry on
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Too many companies and programmers seem to lack a good understanding of what "beta" software really is, because a lot of software they release as beta-grade is really alpha-grade. While there are fairly extensive breakdowns of the development process, I think you can basically divide the quality assurance cycle of a product into four main points.
Pre-alpha grade software is software that is only being tested internally. It probably doesn't work at all. Perhaps some modules work, but it'll mostly be broken until later builds.
Alpha-grade software is software with new features that has yet to be tested, perhaps with the exception of some internal testing. As a result, when you participate with in an alpha test for a piece of software, you're getting a bug-ridden product to say the least. Things probably won't work the way they should; the software will probably crash; and to say the very least, that build shouldn't be rolled out onto a production machine.
Beta-grade software is software that is more-or-less finished, but is being released for a wider test to work out any undiscovered bugs from the previous development stages. A beta-grade product should be production ready, but generally you won't want to roll it out until the final release builds are made.
Your post-beta, or gold stage, is really just the final builds of the product. By that time, any of those builds are ready for market, but they may run through a few compilations just to do last-minute checks.
A lot of companies attach the term "beta" on alpha-grade software simply because they think it'll drum up more PR for the product. In reality, they're just giving their customers a load of bull. That being said, I've found a lot of beta products to be incredibly solid. Mozilla and Opera are two great examples. While they may crash occasionally, or I might find a bug or two if I dig really hard, I could see those beta builds being out on the market.
I have had a couple people invite me to Orkut. I checked it out, but when I got to the sign-up screen and saw the truly horrifying and offensively private questions that were required of me, I backed out. Forget it. If I would never surrender so much private information to some faceless company, how could the fact that it is beta and may be insecure ever have a hope of convincing me?
I'm a member of orkut and trust me, its definately beta. Hardly anything on the site works the first time you use it, it goes down constantly, and I think the interface could use a ton of polish.
You can say something similar about A9. It extends Google, and adds in-book searching, search history features, the toolbar diary, etc. It is a good place for them to work on features before deploying to the actual Amazon site.
And a major reason why these might just be testbeds is that they generate no revenue. The technologies developed may be useful in their revenue-generating products. Having the public test your stuff is a great way to see how it really works.
I think it has a great deal to do with the fact that none of the items mentioned in the list will ever "go gold" as such, and will therefore never really -- which is maybe to say *enforceably* -- go through the feature feeeze/bug fix period that immediately proceeds that event. There's no real financial motivation to ever take it out of beta ( like, say, shipping product ), and there are plenty or reasons - like those mentioned by the poster - not to.
remember the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi: If enough peasants die horribly, someone will probably notice