This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: A contrarian view of beta Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Ryan Lowe takes me to the woodshed over my beta rant from a little while ago. He makes some good points about the larger public impact (i.e., just about none):

Labels like beta on software are completely meaningless to almost everyone but a very small minority of keyboard-wielding geeks. Unless you can be absolutely positive your audience is only other geeks who know how to use a test release, care should be taken with each release you put out.

Fair enough. My comeback on this is twofold:

• If beta is meaningless, why does Google keep every new thing they do in that state?
• Google's initial audience for their new stuff (GMail being a prime example) is the geek audience

Anyhow, Ryan makes some good points, and I don't really disagree with him that much on this.