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Technology: Google Redefines "Beta"
What does it mean for software to be “beta” quality? Wikipedia says that:
Betaware is a nickname for software which has passed the alpha testing stage of development and has been released to a limited amount of users for software testing before its official release… Beta software can be unstable and could cause crashes or data loss.
Google has it’s own definition. Paul McNamara at NetworkWorld points out that almost half of all of Google applications are marked as ‘beta’ quality. These include Gmail, Google Docs, Orkut and Google Finance.
According to Google:
We have very high internal metrics our consumer products have to meet before coming out of beta. Our teams continue to work to improve these products and provide users with an even better experience. We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web, where people expect continual improvements in a product. On the Web, you don’t have to wait for the next version to be on the shelf or an update to become available. Improvements are rolled out as they’re developed. Rather than the packaged, stagnant software of decades past, we’re moving to a world of regular updates and constant feature refinement where applications live in the cloud.
What Google is pointing out is a fact of SaaS and on-Demand that some people might lose sight of. Traditional software goes through rigorous QA, is packaged and is shipped, and finally installed and rolled out. The QA road from development to rollout is a long, thorough and expensive one because the cost to fix problems after rollout is high.
On-demand software is often updated on a daily or weekly basis, but the incremental changes of new releases is typically smaller than
that of tradtional software. Because on-Demand software often changes frequently, there’s more chance that of glitches popping up — although the cure by the vendor is usually just to roll back the software to the previous working revision.
