We live in a beta culture. A Google search of the word “beta” retrieves 399 million articles. That’s more articles than the words “innovation” (108 million), “creative” (78 million), and “finish” (30 million) combined. Even “startup," which is a slightly more formal definition of “beta," only links to 325 million articles.
So what’s our obsession, particularly in the Internet business, with the beta ideal?
The reason, of course, is that everything on the Internet is in such continual flux that more and more digital products are born half-made and thus unready for the commercial world. Indeed, there is so much change online that nothing ever seems to be quite finished. Thus, even today’s Internet, which was once known as Web 2.0 and is now rapidly becoming the “real-time stream,” represents a meta-beta, an evolving beta in the clouds.
The “truth” (not a beta-friendly word) is that in the postmodern culture of the Internet, the ideology of beta is attractive. It represents flexibility, informality, plasticity, becoming -- the apparent essence of the rapidly evolving online world.
A blog, then, with its endless updates and commentary, is akin to a newspaper in beta. Wikipedia, with its always-evolving content, is an encyclopedia in beta. A 140-character tweet is an idea in beta. And John Borthwick’s Betaworks, the innovative incubator that has hatched Summize, Bit.ly, and Tweetdeck, is a midwife of beta real-time startups.
But I’m worried about the increasing centrality of the beta product and the beta ideal in the digital economy. Beta is a creditable practice -- as long it exists in parallel with the more adult world of finished products. But when it becomes the thing-in-itself, when there are no finished products, when everything is in perpetual flux, then the Internet economy has a serious problem.
At a real-time conference that I recently attended in Silicon Valley, almost everything appeared to be in beta. It wasn’t only most of the startups that were demonstrating their half-baked products, but even the sloppily untucked clothing of the unshaven entrepreneurs seemed to exist in a puerile, petulant beta.
What’s missing in this increasingly smoke-and-mirrors economy is the old-fashioned notion of shame. Unfortunately, the adult ideal of perfection has been replaced by the arrogantly childish cult of the half-finished product.
Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), of course, is the informal, “distributed” company that has most unashamedly pioneered the idea of the beta culture and the beta product. The problem with Google, however, is that most of its beta products have failed to take off.
The Chrome browser, for example, seems to exist in perpetual beta, as has the Google space initiative and the Google mobile telephone platform (rather than the Android, they should have called it the Betaoid), and even the “limited release” Google Gulp beta drink.
I suspect, too, that the Chrome Operating System, an initiative announced before it actually exists, will become a beta OS, always in transit and never quite ready for market.
Fortunately, there still remain some grown-up companies amidst the carnage of the beta cult. Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), for example, seems immune to the adolescent beta cult now infecting Silicon Valley. Microsoft didn’t go live with its promising new Bing search engine in late May until the product was actually ready for market.
In stark contrast, the day before the Bing release, Google announced the Wave communications platform, another product that doesn’t yet -- and may never -- exist. No wonder that Bing is having an immediate economic impact on the search-engine market, while all that exists of Wave is a Googlegram, a video, and some screenshots.
The simple fact is that unfinished products are unsuccessful. Thus the cult of beta will, like the Web 2.0 euphoria and other fashionable ephemera, eventually pass.
My advice to startup entrepreneurs is to resist the relaxed lure of the beta. Stand firm against launching your product before it is ready for market. Remember that it’s only real when it’s real. Be critical rather than proud of any imperfection in your products.
And tuck your shirt in, too, please.
— Andrew Keen, Silicon Valley author, broadcaster, and entrepreneur, can be reached on Twitter at @ajkeen.
Should there be such a thing called finished product?
The era of software products designed behind closed doors without dynamic user involvement is over.
a) It costs too much to develop a finished product, especially for startups, yet alone I argue that the concept of finished product is an illusion, products are never finished, and should not be finished.
b) It is too risky to ignore user feedback during development. The chances are you will be increasingly drifted away from user satisfaction. There is no way you would know what users want unless you design your product with them.
c) Increasingly users want to get involved once they experience the satisfaction of being listened. User profiles are changing, the era of passive user is over.
This is in fact what I call the evolutionary design, a concept akin to natural selection we observe in biological systems. The product evolves based on its survival value; its ability to adopt changing user requirements. In fact there is no up-front designer. Users become the nature, and they themselves design the product by selecting the fittest, fittest in terms of giving them the best satisfaction score.
The design by natural selection does not need to be perfect or completely bug free. Take the evolution of human eye for example, which is a strikingly good example to bad design, if there were an up-front designer.
Wikipedia: "The vertebrate eye, is built "backwards and upside down", requiring "photons of light to travel through the cornea, lens, aquaeous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizontal cells, and bipolar cells before they reach the light-sensitive rods and cones that transduce the light signal into neural impulses – which are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the brain for processing into meaningful patterns." This reduction in efficiency may be countered by the formation of a reflective layer, the tapetum, behind the retina. Light which is not absorbed by the retina on the first pass may bounce back and be detected."
The beta paradigm represents evolutionary generations. Each generation, i.e. each beta life cycle changes the product's survival value, sometimes towards the extinction end, other times towards the selection end, and the reality is you would never know up-front whether your product be extinct or survive in x years time. Except that users (the nature) will survive even if it means they may end up selecting and using a different product, not yours which might have become extinct.
Therefore it seems to me that the evolutionary design (hence the beta concept) in software systems is here to stay. We humans have discovered and learned the power of natural selection in the past 150 years, why shouldn't we enjoy exploiting and using that power in commerce and in other areas of human ingenuity.
Finally, I am also thinking Beta as a meme, ie. "a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, and is transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena.",Wikipedia.
Good example, Brian! And I agree that a Beta ribbon should signal a product in trial rather than one not being ready. That said, I think it also depends on how long a product or service (or website) has been a Beta version (or as you put it, "just hasn't caught on yet") like some of those Google lab stuff that's been Beta like forever. Even Gmail had the Beta label for years before it was removed. It's understandable if a site, such as the Pre app store, intends to be in Beta mode for a startup period (usually a short one).
By the way, I just recall Microsoft has been giving away free copies of Windows 7 Ultimate Beta for university students (using us as lab guinea pigs, haha) - so much for Microsoft being immune to the beta cult!
The new App store for the Palm Pre has been criticized because of the small number of applications available. On my Pre, the app store looks like the first week of the IPhone app store.
At an event with Palm, they defended the small number of applications (in fact, I think they have criticized this situation more than reviewers, almost giving cue cards to the reviewers to let them know this is an area of vulnerability).
The apps I've downloaded are mainstream and work fine. But, go to the apps store and you are greeted with a ribbon that says "Beta." Really? Apparently, the Beta tag here applies not because the applications are being tested, or even the store is being tested, but because the selection is limited.
Beta as a code name for "trialing," seems fair. Beta as a code name for "just hasn't caught on yet," doesn't seem as fair.
Agreed! I think the term "Beta" before the Web 2.0 era used to only mean "unfinished" but now it could mean both "unfinished" and "work-in-progress", though I do understand Andrew's points on how people seem to take the Beta concept for granted or use it as a cheap excuse (e.g. 'beta' journalism).
No code is ever a finished product - it's a given and inherent. You can always keep reprogramming your code to improve it and you often decide when to call it "finished". If there're bugs in your software (like most Microsoft products), then your software is Beta by definition whether you spell it out or not. With the rapid pace of the Web innovation, the Beta concept is utilized to help with identifying issues and marketing while ensuring that competitors won't come up with similar products before you do.
By the way, if you bing the key word "beta" instead of googling, you'll get only 100 million results compared to 195 million results if you bing "creative" - that proves the point that Microsoft's avoiding the word "Beta"...
It's pretty fascinating to see just how ingrained the "beta" thinking is. Near as I can tell, Andrew Keen's biggest objection to beta products seems to be qualitative in nature. They're half-baked. It seems we all agree that your product probably should not suck before you put it on the market.
But as others in this thread have noted, what product (especially software) isn't iterative in nature? Software, by it's very nature, always seems to be in a state of "getting the bugs out." I think these are very different things than the beta nonsense that Google has perfected and too many others have copied. Keen's thesis doesn't seem to leave much room for iterative products.
Now I'm certanly NO MS "fanboy", in fact I favor the Open Source Linux/Unix movement that I feel will never gain traction in my lifetime for more reasons than I have room and time to list BUT,
MS doesn't put out Betas to the general public -- though widely panned and lamented Vista was "finished", just not very well!!
SQL 2005, Server 2003, VS 2005, 2008 are all "Finished" products.
Twitter as much as I pan that useless piece of coding is "finished", so are MySpace, FaceBook, and YouTube...
So, who besides Google is fawning us with Beta-ware?? Let's deride Google if we must, but don't hide behind some generalizations that there are vast amounts of "beta" ware out there because I'm just not seeing it!!
I need enlightment with actual examples, not speculations and generalizations...
Funny stuff, J Dambrosio. But what you're describing sounds more like product updates. Surely nothing stays the same forever (whew!), but what Google and folk are doing is giving us their half-finished releases to play with until they get around to completing them. That might be a little different, but still I enjoyed your example. ;)
Anyhow, this entire conversation about the invasion of the "Beta" Culture is just plain silly, really.
I personally consider every product I find out there whether on the 'Net or in the Real World to be a "Finished" product - with the exception of Google's latest gaggle of lame product attempts...
Do we not expect Cars, Televisions, Radios, Microwaves, etc. to evolve over time??
Were cars of the 40's, 50's, 60's, etc. just "betas" to todays vehicles??
NO WAY!!... Same goes for Phones, TV's, Radios, etc, etc. -- the list is so endless I could fill up this Web space...
Software and Web-site innovation is the same, do we really want it to remain the way it was when DARPA evolved the ARPANET way back when??
I think we all know the answer to that one!!...
I still think only GOOGLE is trying to use the public as a "Beta" tester, the rest of the innovative world knows better than to leave it up to us!! ;-)
There was a day in the not so distant past when beta testers were carefully screened and corporations valued and incorporated feedback from beta tests(conducted after alpha tests) into a product or service before it was launched to the greater public.
Today "public beta" seems to have forgotten the word "public" and a beta by a major player such as Google is a marketing campain more than a desire to release the product being offered for beta. By releasing a beta browser Google is better able to determine their competitor's strengths and weaknesses while torpedoing the "choose search provider" option in the competor's product, and putting the Google name in front of potential buyers for additional (pay) products they plan on offering.
Beta is now a viable component of some marketing plans and a way to minimize risk of legal action should there be a problem with how the product is utilized. Beta is not like the old techie phobia of "avoid anything marked version 1.0" and unlike the old "vaporware" term is actually available to use (although with no actual promise of sustainability).
Consumers need to understand the risks of beta and the term will (personal opinion) morph into another yet another way to describe something that is currently "free" but is also likely to require payment at some point in the future, or will be provided "free" with the purchase of something else (like the proposed Google operating system).
Beta is not a bad thing. Consumer expectations however will need to be revised to accomodate a potential flood of products that ultimately may never exist. Ever hear of the old expression "All dressed up with nowhere to go"? That describes how marking executives are re-defining the term: Beta.
Back 10-15 years ago, beta was considered unfinished. But many people at that time wanted in on beta projects. It was considered a prestige item to be included in beta's in the 90's and forward.
Thats why you see this constant desire to push "beta" because it still has that allure attached to it. Gmail is for all intents and purposes a finished product, Google will not call it that, but the millions of users of it attest to its polish.
So, consider it bringing forward of the desire from yesteryear, combined with the ease and quickness to change with today, and you have what you are talking about.
Look at video games, they are released, and on Day 0 they have patches for you to download. Thats great they want to fix their product of bugs. But it only lends to that concept of beta, unfinished stuff that you're paying to beta test for them.
I think the launch of things like Sourgeforge and its ability to do nightly build-a-thon downloading of programs to always be on the cutting edge feeds into this desire. Is it a bad thing, again, not really, but it all swirls around itself to continue to churn the beta bucket.
Good article Andrew, and very spot on, agree completely.
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Dead since 1832, Jeremy Bentham is a cadaver that has been living in public ever since, on display beside "Dapple," his favorite walking stick, in a glass-fronted wooden coffin at London’s University College. His coffin was coined as an “Auto-Icon” by Bentham, which is a neologism meaning "a man who is his own image." Below is an excerpt from Andrew Keen’s new book, Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, in which he describes recognizing the Auto-Icon as a symbol for the digital age.
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Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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