Should Companies Delay Products for More Features?

conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece looking at if it makes sense for companies such as Sony to delay the release of products to ensure that when they do come out they are absolutely top of the line. From the article: 'In the tech world, where consumer trends can rise and fall and product cycles are short, that's more often the exception than the rule. The penalty for a delay can be severe -- even catastrophic. One of the biggest risks in postponing a product launch is being out-hustled to market by rivals.'"

Comments

Who is kidding who?

[WebHostingGuy]

Read the article and the real reason is plain as day:

"The main holdups were a copyright protection mechanism for the PS3's high-definition DVD player."
Yeah, right, top of the line cool features are delaying shipment. By the way, I have a bridge I want to sell you; and Vista is shipping this month!!

No

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

they should delay until all the QA testing and debugging are done. Adding features to buggy products leads to Microsoft Windows-like products and no ends of pain for customers/users...

Good Example

[XMilkProject]

Bethesda is an example of a company that typically waits until everything is 'just right' before releasing.

The company rarely gives any public information about timelines, they simple say "It will be released when it is done". Which often includes many long delays, but when the product finally is released you can always count on getting your money's worth.

Re:Good Example

[Lando]

Funny,
      The Bethesda products that I have purchased have all had major bugs that should have been caught long ago. However, I'll agree with the fact that when they are developing code to fix the bugs that they make sure those fixes are bulletproof. Of course, you can't prove any problems with bugfixes that are never released. Bethesda does/did have some nice concepts, but they are not, repeat, not a company that releases quality code. I did like the concept of their games originally, but it's been what 10 years and they are still following the same patterns? Nothing new there and they didn't have networking when I purchased programs from them.

However, I would offer a couple of other companies that have excellent reputations for releasing good products:

Blizzard: Probably the formost company that could be considered, barring Duke Nukem 2000 ever coming out. They pushed release dates back several times on Diable and starcraft and other programs making sure that the games had very few problems. However, I haven't purchased any Blizzard product since they abused the DMCA and decided to attack my peer group for fixing their network issues.

id also has an excellent reputation and I still purchase every product that they release, though I haven't opened any of the packages once I saw Quake 3. I'm mainly just contributing to fund the release of the source code nowdays.

The last one I would recommend is an online game, atitd.com, ie A tale in the desert. I don't have time to play atm, but I continue to pay my subscription because it appears to me that the developer is more interested in providing a good product than to make a lot of money.

These comments represent my opinions, nothing more. I am not an avid gamer and since I don't have a windows box, though I doubt I am missing much. Game design has gone downhill as the cost of producing the games have gone up, also my opinion.

ps, Just a brief comment. Half-life, counter-strike(not the same), and Blizzard games are excellent examples of how quality products can overcome idiotic business strategies. Stream is a joke, making it blatently obvious that you don't "own" your game and blizzard's suing over enhancing player experience is just stupid in my opinion and so I refuse to having anything to do with those companies. However, a great many people are more than willing to put up with the bs to be allowed to play decent games.

Re:Is it soup yet?

[patio11]

You can find plenty of examples either way on this. iPod/iTunes was beat to market by essentially everyone, and they absolutely revolutionized the MP3 player industry, making people pay premium prices for what used to be commodity hardware. On the other hand, take a look at WinZip. WinZip got to market with its core functionality -- zipping/unzupping in a GUI environment -- and approximately nothing else. This would not have been difficult functionality to implement, considering the actually zipping/unzipping was originally handled by pkzip, which had to be present for winzip to function. Regardless, they got the lion's share of the market by being the first there with a product which worked and was targetted at non-technical users being introduced to the whole new "online" thing back in the early 90s. They're also *obscenely* profitable -- something like 60% of sales, even today when their products' core feature is built into Windows.