BETA
There has been a discussion on a board I’m a member of about BETA products.
I think Beta is an excuse to offer a half done product and fix on the fly. We don’t demand QUALITY anymore, and companies know that. Why come out with a great finished product if we can toy around with it and re-release in a couple of years and force all the suckers who bought the early release to get the new version.
Just ask Microsoft. They never fixed the bugs in Windows 2, they just created new features and re-released with 3 , then Windows NT then when that flopped ME, which bombed, then Windows XP , Windows Vista and now Windows 7. Portions of Google are still considered BETA. Instead of fixing what was broken, they added more “features” and increased the price.
My wife and everyone around her has an iPad. Everyone loves the iPad, but then the iPad 2 came out and some of those same people who were so IN LOVE with their iPad, turned around and bought the iPad 2. Guess what? The iPad3 is out. I love Apple, but I haven’t bought an iPad yet. I just keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. I anticipate a 2014 launch of the iPad4 with MIND BLOWING technology.
Why not spend the money for the newest and greatest in technology now?
Because I remember the BAG PHONE that I used to sell and wanted when I worked at Radio Shack in the early 90′s. I didn’t get it because I couldn’t justify the cost of the phone and service in exchange what new technology will come out in the term of when I truly NEEDED a cell phone.
Now I have a cell phone, not the Windows Phone, NOT the iPhone, but a nice Android phone. I know that there will be more powerful phones that have and will come out, but this phone serves my needs and is the thing I used to type this entry out.
BETA used to be a testing platform where products are limited to beta testers who would try and break the product, finding issues before it was ever released.
Now beta is an excuse. “Well, you know we are in BETA.” Not good enough. When you have a product , take pride in its release because if it crashes and some of them will, your pride will not be the only thing that you lose, it is your customers and future customers. You become the punchline to a joke.
In that way, aren’t we all in BETA?
Huh?
None of the hardware you mention is in Beta. None of it is being released for the masses to test. Like all technology, it becomes outdated as the components improve. So the iPad was a complete product. The iPad2 was an improved one. etc. If the first one serves your needs, you don’t buy the next, or the next, or the next until you need to replace yours.
As for Windows… well, NT was a huge success. It was aimed at corporate users, and thrived there, and was used as a basis for future versions, and evetually Windows 2000. It was never meant to be on a home machine. 3.1 to 95 was a huge jump in how the OS worked. ME was a joke. XP was another major shift. Vista was, yet again, a complete rewrite. 7 was Vista with all the bugs fixed. Now 8 is actually out IN BETA, because it’s far far cheaper to offer up a free, limited version to the masses and say “find our bugs” than to do it in-house with a product that is 98% finished. There’s no user bias, there’s no “this is just how it works” excuse that makes it to the public. The result being that it costs millions less in R&D and therefore lowers the price. Plus, 8, like Vista, is a whole new beast, and a free beta gets it in the hands of the power users before the general public starts bitching about how different it is.
Google offers everything up for free, and does things nobody has done before. The beta phase for them is as much about user acceptance as bug squashing. So when they’ve found a system that’s accepted, it comes out of beta. Do you think if they said “Google+ Final Version!” that people would have flocked to it any more? Nobody’s forcing you to sign up for their service.
Using your mentality, nobody would own anything, because things keep being improved upon. My appliances are more efficient than my parents’. My car is better than the one I used to have. My home is better built than a mud shack. That doesn’t mean my parents shouldn’t have had appliances, I shouldn’t have had a car in my 20′s, or that nobody should have lived in mud shacks.
You buy what you need/want when need/want it. If you become a slave to the product cycle just because something’s new, that’s not the fault of the manufacturers.