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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'?"
It's quite simple actually:
:) (in the software I mean :) )
today you have to develop things fast
faster development = more bugs
beta version= decreased liability (because of the bugs) while still collecting profits/'name-building'/etc
For example Google API is in a 'forewer beta', they state: "The Google Web APIs service is currently in beta form and has not been fully tested or debugged. Accordingly, Google disclaims any responsibility for any harm resulting from your use of Google Web APIs. "
Imagine if a bridge building company would say something like this. It's plain scary. I mean, get some IT marketing guy and he'll find a way how 'the drivers should do the initial bridge testing'.
What's scary is that even the free projects lately are starting be quite-Beta-excusable for the bugs. Which is bad, since, as we all know, there isn't any valid excuse for having bugs
Now, the thing to do is to patent this Beta concept for selling out half baked potatos for the full price, if you live in Europe that is.
Maybe not "commerical interest", but nonetheless you are trying to get some. I haxxored your site and found the following psuedo-SQL code:
The test server that was up before slashdot switched.
/me sniffs
Brak was his name, wasn't it? Oh, we had some good times together. Crazy stories, everyone had mod points. Ah yes, that was the day.
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
You're not paying for these sites, so what do you expect?
Open source software does this a lot as well. And it touches stuff that I use right now: the Scons build system is stuck at version 0.95. Mozilla Thunderbird is at version 0.6. Mozilla Firefox is at 0.8. Does this mean that there's anything glaringly wrong about the functionality that they provide? No. It means that there may be a couple of rough edges and that work is still ongoing to finish less important features and to polish up the project. If they were boxed products on the shelf I'd be upset, but since I paid a total of $0 - and they work for me - I don't care what the version number is.
Anyway, I think this is a reflection of the development model more than anything else. Commercial software tends to have a "really big design up front", followed by a bunch of milestones to implement. Open source software (and web-based applications like Google) tend to be more organic. More a work of sculpting one feature at a time than a messy work of planned burocracy. The features that are important tend to be implemented first. And given that the core 10% of most software's features is used 90% of the time - this isn't a problem to most users.
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.