Thoughts on the Beta culture
By Mitchell Hislop | December 17, 2009
We live in a beta culture – everything, starting with the applications we use to the services we rely on are constantly being improved and developed.
We have gone from people going to the store and buying software to hundreds of thousands of people who willingly use software that is not fully stable for the sake of testing and making it better, as well as functional.
One service that I constantly use is Google Voice which is an invite only beta. In addition to that, several apps on my phone and about a dozen apps on my computer are also in “beta.”
Beta is a stage of development. It is a release that is stable for the most part, but not ready for the public yet. It can be open to the public or just a limited number of people, who use it in their daily life and report back with feedback and bugs they find.
It helps companies cut down on costs, as well as speed up development time rather than having a few developers play with it, it gets released to the masses.
What is strange is the shift that this has caused. We now have tons of people who are willing to use software that is rife with bugs, errors, and limitations, all in the sake of making the experience better as a whole.
Beta testers are an unsung group. Without them, Gmail would not be where they are, Flickr would not be able to auto-post to Twitter, and many mobile apps would not exist. The entire tech industry would be way behind where it is right now, all because some people will put up with buggy software.
(If you are wondering about the title, it is derived from my personal blog, “Thoughts and Visions from Hislop”).
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2 Responses to “Thoughts on the Beta culture”
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1:16 pm on December 17th, 2009
[...] did a post on beta culture a while back. I re-vamped some of my thoughts, and re-posted it on the SMCpros blog. Worth a read and a chat. [...]
9:03 pm on December 23rd, 2009
Hasn’t software always been improved iteratively? Calling something a beta doesn’t mean what it meant back in the day. On a medium sized software package you would see one or two alpha releases, one or two beta releases and then a final release. Now, you could see hundreds of iterations while in beta. This agile methodology is testament to how connected our lives are now–how much easier it is to push updates live.
Don’t believe what you see; the term beta is a cop-out in case something goes wrong.