Beta: Greek for Better?

      by Wyatt Walter

While perusing forums and blogs, I’ve noticed a trend that seems to be happening, though I can’t quite put a finger on it. We know from a lot of articles that have been written recently that a good chunk of Google’s products are still listed as being in beta. A piece of software that I particularly enjoy, Zimbra, has a number of new features coming down the pipe that are also in beta and have been for some time. Other companies such as Amazon have had products in place such as EC2 that they want others to rely upon, yet they are still marked as beta.

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There are two things that I take away from this phenomena. First, people are relying upon beta or otherwise unsupported software seemingly with their lives. This was especially apparent to me (I tend to follow more open source products than anything) with the Zimbra Desktop and the earlier releases of Firefox 3. People (IT admins sometimes!) don’t seem to understand that unsupported means unsupported. The second thing that stands out as a bit ridiculous given the first point is that some of these companies want their users to depend upon their software. For instance, Google released Chrome some time ago in beta form. It’s completely unsupported and definitely an immature release. Yet, at the same time, Gmail has been in beta for years with no end in sight that I’m aware of.

Having people want to depend upon software that hasn’t had a supported release yet doesn’t surprise me. People tend to do some dumb things. Now, it’s all fine and dandy to have the latest and greatest even if it’s still a bit buggy. In fact, I want to be running on the bleeding edge of technology and can sympathize. It’s fun and exciting. Unfortunately, they call it the bleeding edge for a reason. Sometimes even mature software fails or has new bugs that crop up, let alone a product that’s not even been deemed release-able by its maker! Most in the software development industry will have no sympathy for people who have lost data or had productivity crippled by relying on software that is released under the ‘beta’ badge, and for good reason. I’ve watched countless unfortunate souls in the Zimbra forums download their email to Zimbra Desktop via POP and then have no where to go with it (a remedy to come soon!). So why is this an issue?

Given the definition of beta software and the warnings above, I’d never use Gmail. Yet, here I am, using Gmail. Why? Unfortunately I have no answers, only questions and observations. We’ve come to rely upon applications like Gmail. Google Docs, and a whole host of other Google products. We have servers that run on Amazon’s EC2 platform that whole businesses are relying upon. It would seem that some of the largest computer and Internet companies in the world want no liability for anything that could possibly go wrong, yet in the same breath want us to depend upon their services. Google News (not a beta product) suffered from this same crossroad just a few months ago. We saw an article get published to Google News via an automated crawler get pushed to Wall Street and cause some real damage. Google wants us to rely upon them as a reliable source to get our news, yet it’s going to blindly add stories from years past? Granted all of the blame doesn’t fall on them, but where’s the line? Gmail is another prime example. During the past summer months, Gmail was plagued with downtime issues, yet here we are, dependent upon Gmail. Plus, Gmail is a great source of revenue with ads on the interface (I’ve clicked on a few myself!) for Google, yet for whatever reason they want to avoid responsibility and supporting it. I’m a fan of Google products myself, don’t get me wrong, but let’s get some consistency here.

Like I mentioned before, I have no solutions, only questions. I think, though, that there are some serious questions that need answering from some of the larger providers of Internet services. Or perhaps it’s a simple misuse of beta. Could be ‘beta’ be the next ‘cloud’? Could it be the most undefinable, yet attacked and loved idea? Okay, so maybe not. But, for real, which is it? Can we depend upon Gmail, EC2, etc. or not? If so, we need a new label.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (1) : Oct 7th, 2008

One Response to “Beta: Greek for Better?”

  1. website design Says:
    October 12th, 2008 at 12:05 pm

    Valleywag sometime back had an article in which they said, beta, means we know that our product still sucks

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