3 Responses for "Has ‘Beta’ Lost Its Definition?"

1. Matt Burris

   December 19th, 2004 at 1:43 am

   1

   I was thinking the same thing yesterday after perusing Yahoo’s beta video search service. It made me think about the meaning of beta, and how it is seemingly being abused lately by companies.

   I don’t think beta has losts its meaning. What it has done is become a crutch for companies to lean on. Usually because they don’t have the resources or are too lazy to dedicate them, to properly test an application. They figure if something goes wrong, they can point at the beta sign, and use that as an excuse. However, the longer they use it, the more they look like they’re not sure of themselves, and don’t have what it takes to do the job properly. Once they get rid of the “beta” crutch, if someone goes wrong, they have only themselves to blame, and they come under fire for it.

   There’s nothing wrong with using the “beta” tag on an application, it’s all a matter of balance — how long you use it, and how solid the application is after the beta.

2. Diogo

   December 19th, 2004 at 8:08 am

   2

   Well it’s certainly being somewhat abused, but I think internally the Beta designation still holds its original meaning. The proliferation of its use from an outsider’s perspective can be attributed to, I think, two main reasons. First is increased competition in the search market, which is where you see most of the abuse taking place. Development cycles are still the same, but it’s a lot cheaper to just make your Beta public, thus testing and ironing out bugs while gaining some mind and market share at the same time. And this is tied into the second reason: Google.

   It’s a cliche, but they started all this. Google gave us lots of coll toys to play with, they worked for the most part and they sported the Beta designation. This made the word somewhat hip and sent the marketing folks into a frenzy. From then on it’s simply been a case of following the leader.

   As for the seemingly interminable Beta cycles I think this has only happened in a few cases. Google News is probably tied, as others have mentioned before, into the inability of Google to derive profit from it by showing contextual ads. Then there’s MSN search, it’s already ‘good enough’ by Microsoft standards, but I believe it’s on standby because they still hasn’t figured out a way of integrating it with Windows without arousing monopolistic fears. So in the end I think the long ‘Beta’ cycles are mostly tied into non-technical issues.

3. JC

   December 19th, 2004 at 8:03 pm

   3

   well, there’s two major kinds of betas I’d complain about… there’s the mozilla foundations keep-it-in-beta-for-5-years approach, which is stupid, and the microsofts oh-it-didn’t-crash-much-this-week-lets-release-it approach
   somewhere there’s a happy medium.