Why Betas Are Good

Robert Scoble points to an article at Microsoft Monitor complaining that Microsoft is releasing too many betas.  Personally, I love the fact that companies are releasing previews of their software openly and regularly and I want to see more of it.  I know if it actually leads to better software or not, but it lets me evaluate new technology ahead of time and decide if it’s worth pursuing.  Most commonly it’s not worth pursuing straight away but later I run into a project that could benefit from that technology and return to see where it got to.  By that stage the product is normally out in a final release (often a 2.0 or 3.0).  The beta allowed me to see in broad strokes what the software was capable of and get a quick feel for it.

That of course does mean that if you put out a truly awful beta release I’ll probably decide the technology is useless, but it would require a seriously bad release to do that.  Besides, if the technology is totally useless and you were prepared to release it,even as a beta  it doesn’t bode well for the final release anyway.  If the software has a lot of bugs and crashes a lot or behaves unexpectedly that’s okay, but the core technology had better be properly thought out or it will be too late to fix it anyway.

More importantly though, I haven’t tied myself to anyone company so I don’t really care if Microsoft’s (or anyone else’s) beta releases give it such a bad name that everyone moves away from it’s products and it goes belly up.  I’m a user, I’m not supposed to care about that – I just care about the technology potential and if the beta excites me, then it will probably excite others too and do well.

The real problem that Microsoft has is that they have a number of core projects going which have blown their schedules and are in danger of entering a death march.  I’m sure they’ll rescue them but that’s what’s causing the bad publicity, not the fact that marketing is hyping products before they’ve been finished.  Not living up to the hype isn’t a huge problem for a company, but wasting millions of dollars because project management went wrong is a big problem.  If releasing betas can help the project team set milestones and deliver on them then they will help keep the project on track and that’s far more important than worrying about whether or not a few people are disappointed by the beta.