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Are Betas Taking On Lives of Their Own?
Ant writes "CNET News.com's Paul Festa thinks the final stage of software development, beta versions, are taking on a life of their own, as companies tinker endlessly with their products in public according to a recent article. Google is one of the companies that keep using "beta" term for years for its products."
IIRC, betas are mainly used for bug fixing, not for new features, that's mainly a pre-beta thing.
Mike Pacific
Really? A quick look at sourceforge shows 14799 projects in beta, while there are a total of 38186 projects in a pre-beta state. Compare that to the 13509 total projects in a post-beta state. Most telling, the largest single development status is Planning, with 15049 projects in that state. Making the assumption that sourceforge is representative of the open source development world, I'd draw that conclusion that over half (based on a total of 66494 total active projects on sourceforge at the time of this writing) of all open source projects don't even get to a usable state (another assumption: a project in a beta state is far enough along to be used by more than the development team and uber power users).
Of course, this all depends on how one defines beta, and since sourceforge developers get to set their own statuses, what they think may be beta code is really mature, or production/stable could actually be alpha. Take the numbers with a grain of salt.
The article largely faults Google, Mozilla, and other recent products, but IMHO, Microsoft are as much to blame as anyone.
A Microsoft "beta" is more of an early alpha or first-run-able release put out for marketing purposes. Certainly not a feature-complete release needing bug-fixes, as the beta tag normally suggests.
This is typically followed by a number of "release candidates," which Microsoft ships for months or even YEARS before the product is finalized and boxed. The industry traditionally considers a release-candidate a final product that could potentially be boxed and shipped if it successfully meets the testing and quality guidelines. Microsoft seem to call their betas "release candidates," where none but the last few builds might merit that title.
These releases are occasionally supplemented by "preview releases," "early experience" releases, and similar euphemistic builds.
What all this amounts to is that the public testing period is lengthened and the status of the product is artificially inflated in order to keep the product in the press. This has the neat (for Microsoft) side-effect of creating plenty of FUD around competing products.
Witness the endless steam of Longhorn early releases, stories, and leaks. Every one intended to keep corporate and other buyers from even *considering* adopting strategies involving Linux, MacOS X, or other alternate platforms.
Longhorn (or insert next great Microsoft product here) is *always* coming "just around the bend." Just wait a little longer. There's no need to switch to something else. Have a look at this cool new "Longhorn preview release." What? No, of course we haven't been promising a new database file system since at least the Cairo beta days......
- Corporation you work for?
- Other webmail providers you've maybe used?
- Carnivore? (yes, it's not a corporation, but does it really matter?)
- ...
The list is long. Google is no different, it is just honest about it. What other _free_ webmail system you've seen that offers:- 1GiB of space
- sending of attachments up to 10MiB
- unlimited filters and categorizing options for your mail
- no image ads
- automatic phishing detection and disabling links in phishing emails
- speed almost of local application (on my computer, usually even faster)
- Domain Key Signing support
- unlimited POP access
- really useful search that actually works, and works fast (it's Google after all)
- autocompletion of recipient fields from addressbook
- email address plussing
- at least 32 variations on your username by default, _besides_ plussing
- feedback system that reacts within minutes, and fixes your problems within hours
- spam filter with >95% accuracy (atleast for me)
- clean and well designed UI
- giving you three months of inactivity before it puts your account to sleep
- ability to put any information you want in addressbook, and search through it all
- labels instead of folders, so you can have orthogonal categories without extra effort
- reliability better than most commercial solutions
- full Unicode (UTF8) support
and so on... I surely think it's much more advanced than any other webmail around.-- So, quoting myself isn't that bad. --me
to a computer scientist, a hacker is someone who tinkers with access to a supposedly secure system
Hehe, it appears the word's meaning has been so lost and distorted that even those who would defend it and correct its misuse are confused.
The Jargon File defines hacker thoroughly for those who really want to know what it means. Or what it meant, anyway, before it escaped the obscurity of hackerdom and entered mainstream use as a label for someone who breaks into computer systems.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Google has already struck deals with some news sites regarding registration: The NY Times likes getting traffic from Google News, and so it lets people who click on the Google links read the stories withotu registering.
Similar deals could prevent lawsuits: News sites who want to get linked to would have to agree not to sue for copyright infringement when Google summarizes their stories. (I'm referrring only to Google News itself, of course: Cutting a deal with a search engine shouldn't affect a site's ranking in the main index.)