Mary is absolutely right that the meaning of Beta for software releases is so diluted its practically meaningless. Most startups and now major companies (except their flagship products) are perpetually in Beta. This is, in part, a good thing. If a vendor warns against flaws and develops a track record of improving them. Users accepting products at face value and being involved in its improvement through testing. Software is a flawed creature, not just because of the developers behind it or the users in front of it, its meant to be broken. Accepting a little informality and being open to conversation leads to better products and can be the basis of great long term relationships.
However, the brand dilution of Beta may have gone to far. Consider where it started:
"hardware or software systems often go through two stages of release testing: Alpha (in-house) and Beta (out-house?)."
"This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. Alpha Test was the unit, module, or component test phase; Beta Test was initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design, and the D test was the C test repeated after the model had been in production a while."
Software development today has increasing overlap between design and implementation. You might recall that Netscape pushed the envelope of overlapping design and implementation while making Beta sexy for users. Yahoo took the practice a step further with tighter iterations and a practice of releasing Beta to a subset of users. These and other marketing and development models defined release cycles during the internet time of the boom. Through bust it was sustained, perhaps because increasingly turbulet markets have led to failure, which leads to learning, which adapts practice -- the better practice is to release early and often.
The decline of packaged software means constant connection between vendor and user, implying a different form of relationship. Even if the user doesn't report bugs or demand updates, the software does for them. In many cases, particularly for consumer apps, the default allows the user to decide whether to submit automatic feedback or update. This is hardly conversation that leads to relationship, but the connection is there nonetheless. Just as important, the software evolves before our eyes and we expect it to.
Language evolves as well, especially in marketing. The brand of innovation that Beta implies has led to its wide adoption and consequent dilution. Perhaps because industry standard software from major vendors is buggy and especially insecure, the bar has been set lower. But that does not mean that users have necessarily become more innovative or less laggardly. The psychodemographic segments of the technology adoption lifecycle still remain, although segments have greater influence over each other and the speed of diffusion can be accerated over the network.
If Beta is diluting as a brand and it doesn't represent industry practice, a couple of scenarios could unfold:
- Status quo dilution increases the pace of commoditization. When an industry cannot define relative quality, signaling quality has a higher cost while prices fall to the lowest common denominator.
- Users revolt and the market flocks to those who incur the cost of signaling quality. Fresh Outta Beta would regain meaning and development is done in pursuit of quality. In some ways, this is what is happening with consolidation in enterprise software as savvy buyers limit relationships to what they can manage.
- The industry attempts to standardize on quality, driven by a dominant vendor like it IBM did in the above excerpt.
- Language shifts to define the missing stage between traditional Beta and software ready for the mainstream market. The emphasis of marketing shifts from information to relationships. Products become judged less by their stage of development, but by their rate of change.
Perhaps the latter is already happening. Where we used to have Fresh Outta Beta, we now have fresh out of the Lab or Research. Somehow R&D has become a marketing mechanism. But the reframing these terms provide is really an aside.
If value is shifting from software to information services and community, its not just because the network enables it -- its because the people behind and in front of the software demand it. The only constant in software development is change, and its not just developers that want to embrace change. Users want software that improves over time and to be a part of conversations on where it is and where its going. This overlap in preferences, as well as the desire for a community that surrounds a tool to connect, provide an opportunity for relationships and incentives that are stronger than branding -- where we embrace change together.