What Does Beta Mean To You?
By Rich Menga on May 21, 2009 in Editorials | comments(4)
Beta, to the best of my understanding, is a level of completion concerning software development.
There’s the alpha stage, which loosely translates to "this is the very early stage; it’s very rough around the edges".
Then comes the beta stage which usually means "almost everything works but its still somewhat buggy".
After that there may be several beta versions. Beta 1, 2, 3, 3a, etc.
Then comes the release candidate, often abbreviated as RC. The latest downloadable version of Windows 7 at the time of this writing, for example, is an RC. There may be a few versions of that as well. RC 1, RC 2, etc.
Some software titles skip the RC development part altogether and go straight from beta to release.
Speaking of which, the official release is the final version. For example, on my XP computer box I am running Internet Explorer 8. Not 8 beta. Not 8 RC. It’s the official release of 8, period. The long version number is 8.0.6001.18702, like this:
And with Firefox it looks like this:
You get the idea.
Beta to me means unfinished. I have never defined beta as "cool", because anything "cool" is worthless when you’re trying to get things done.
If Apple released an "iPhone 4G beta", the first question by iPhone users would be, "Why would Apple release an unfinished product?"
Upcoming Linux distributions that are in beta stage make it quite clear that everything doesn’t work like it’s supposed to and to expect that. This is perfectly okay because, well, betas are supposed to be buggy.
Generally speaking, the only time beta is misused as "cool" is when it comes to web sites such as Gmail. And in fact this may work against Google, because in all honesty, who wants to subscribe to a service for enterprise use that has "unfinished" tacked right on the title of the product?
Not exactly a confidence booster.
What do you think?

Yes, I was a cubicle dweller and lived it up (read: down) in the corporate lifestyle for several years. It is the land where the most exciting thing that happens all day is when the server goes down (again).