{"id":218,"date":"2006-01-11T17:21:53","date_gmt":"2006-01-12T00:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=218"},"modified":"2006-01-11T17:21:53","modified_gmt":"2006-01-12T00:21:53","slug":"the_beta_cultur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=218","title":{"rendered":"The beta culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Register, displaying its usual British reserve, calls Google’s new video store “a really crap web site<\/a>,” featuring “a dismal interface wrapped in a shambles of a delivery mechanism.” Google’s other new innovation, the Google Pack, is also suffering some rough reviews. Paul Thurrott, writing on the Windows SuperSite, details his unpleasant experience<\/a> installing the pack: “I consider myself to be reasonably competent with a PC, and I was already familiar with most of the applications found in Google Pack. But it still took me about 90 minutes from start to finish, along with several system reboots, to get this suite of applications up and running on my test PC. There’s just no real integration here, and the fact that many of these applications require so much updating speaks poorly of this effort.”<\/p>\n

Google Pack and Google Video are both, according to Google, in “beta.” So are a lot of other publicly available Google products, like Google Groups, Google Blog Search, Google Book Search, Google Reader, Google Web Accelerator, Google Scholar, and even the venerable trio Gmail, Froogle and Google News. This approach of constantly launching new products as betas has earned Google considerable praise. It’s been held up, for instance, as a new model for how software companies can get new products or features out into the marketplace quickly, then improve them as they’re used. It’s also been noted that calling new products “betas” may insulate Google from lawsuits.<\/p>\n

But while I used to think the beta approach was a pretty nifty idea, now I’m having my doubts. While Google has certainly proved that it can produce wonderful products, like its bread-and-butter search engine and its addictive Google Earth, a lot of those beta products – and not just the new ones – are pretty lackluster. Froogle, for example, is unpleasant to use, and Blog Search is just plain dreary. The tossing of half-baked products onto the web is starting to look less like a brilliant idea than a sign of hubris. You get the sense that the great minds at Google believe that we lowly users should be grateful for any scrap they throw out to us. Google may be in the process of creating a dysfunctional “beta culture” that puts the interests of its engineers ahead of the interests of its customers. Eventually, if it keeps pumping out mediocre beta products and letting them lie around more or less indefinitely, it will start to tarnish its brand, if not wear out its welcome. We all know success breeds hubris, and we know what hubris breeds, too.<\/p>\n

Yes, there’s a certain thrill to feeling like you’re a beta tester for the world’s coolest company. But once the thrill wears off, you’re just annoyed. You start to remember why they call them betas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Register, displaying its usual British reserve, calls Google’s new video store “a really crap web site,” featuring “a dismal interface wrapped in a shambles of a delivery mechanism.” Google’s other new innovation, the Google Pack, is also suffering some rough reviews. Paul Thurrott, writing on the Windows SuperSite, details his unpleasant experience installing the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}