What Comes After Alpha + Beta ?

jordan at beach
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Now I understand why Mike Arrington's rumoured not to be cricket blog isnt online, as with mine. We worry about the same things. Call it universal beta angst. Damn Web 2.0 think small, $100k to ship a 3 month beta, then upgrade mentality. Is this a sprint, 1500 metre or marathon run ? Mike's "Dont Blow Your Beta" article is spot on. The only addition I would make (esp for someone like myself looking at launching certain products in regional markets) is to know when your window of opportunity is (as Jeremy Zawodny mentioned yday re feedster) In Australia, blogging is just on the early stage of being mainstream, but dont start talking to them about RSS. People are starting to understand "user generated content" but "attention" is something that happens downstairs. My point, anyway, was sometimes you might drop 20% of your "stretch" features (to use an old term I learnt at MS) that arent goig to be used as much. (i wish microsoft had done this with the latest office suite, damn i hate it) The benefit being to get to market 2 months early and hit your next valuation milestone. I find though once alot of people launch, then the next upgrades take forever, whatever they called their alpha, beta, launch. You really need to know your consumer though as its easy to click back to google and yahoo. All this product manager rationalising could be an excuse though. Once you launch, you are accountable. Great points to ponder though. Mike : "Some people take the “rolling feature release” idea above to mean they can release half-baked stuff. This allows for a quicker launch, of course. Slap a label on it, like “developer release”, “alpha” or “beta” and the hope is that people will be understanding and kind, and give you good advice and suggestions for improvement and evolution. This is a bad idea. You will be crucified for wasting people’s time and they will leave brutal comments slamming your product. It is far better to delay launch, or remove the feature entirely, than show stuff that doesn’t work. This is a “fall on your sword” issue. If the team is pressing to do this, spend political capital in fighting it. Your equity will be worth more because of it. Pre-launch labels do not protect you from scorn."

Fred: Maybe you can clarify something for me. Since I've been, you know, waiting for the fleet to show up, I've read a lot, and...
Ted: Really?
Fred: And one of the things that keeps popping up is this about "subtext." Plays, novels, songs - they all have a "subtext," which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know. But what do you call the message or meaning that's right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what's above the subtext?
Ted: The text.
Fred: OK, that's right, but they never talk about that.

(Barcelona (1994) Directed by Whit Stillman)