Beta has become meaningless

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Online services such as Flickr and Gmail are apparently in "Beta". However, Flickr has a huge community, and Gmail accounts are very common. How are they still in "Beta"?

What exactly is Beta, anyway?

Here's one of the results that Google threw up when I asked it to Define:beta:

A version of an application that is made available prior to the official release for the purposes of testing.

But it's worth pointing out that for most of the companies producing software that is only ever in beta, the term "beta" appears to mean something more like the following:

We are not accountable for any issues you may encounter, or the consequences of any such issues.

Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?! But to be honest, this is in pretty much every "terms of service" agreement anyway. The meaning of beta is extremely ambiguous.

Just for fun, here's what Googlism thinks:

beta is meaningful
beta is now the norm
beta is not necessarily cause for concern

It certainly seems to be the norm. Cause for concern? Possibly. But beta is not meaningful anymore.

Why release a beta? For testing purposes. But at the moment, "Beta" seems to be slapped onto just about anything. Sure, if software isn't finished or is buggy, it's a good way to release an early version. But nobody knows what to expect with beta.

Beta has become an acceptable label for online services that work perfectly well and are actually quite popular. Now, this may not be a problem in and of itself, but it leads to something much worse.

Beta has become an excuse for releasing software that is not just unfinished, it's extremely unreliable. It's rare to see an explanation of what beta actually means to the product or service you're using, and to be frank, this means that pretty much anything could happen to you while using beta software.

As I said earlier, beta is for testing purposes. The goal of testing is to find bugs. But few, if any, programs or online services can claim to be 100% bug free. The ultimate goal does not seem to be fixing every bug. It is to get the product working in the best possible way and with the minimum amount of disruption. Minor bugs and quirks can exist without making the software unusable.

Both alpha and beta should be "feature complete" releases of software. So, a product that is forever in beta could actually gain no new features whatsoever. But that's not the point of beta. The point is to find the bugs and fix them if necessary. Software that has totally new features added while in beta might benefit from a slightly more realistic software testing cycle.

I'm not sure why software is apparently afraid of moving from Beta to 1.0. Version 1.0 is not a holy grail. It is the first complete version that's ready for people to use. Even then, it won't be the definitive product that it could be. That's why the version number increases.

I prefer Mozilla's approach - i.e. everything before 1.0 is effectively a work in progress. While it's not obvious how long it'll take to get to 1.0, at least you can see how far along the line they've got.

With endless beta software, we've got no idea how long it'll take to get to "1.0". And if beta means unstable and unreliable, with a total lack of accountability for problems and the like, why are people using beta software?

The answer is simple. This isn't really beta software. Beta has just replaced version numbers. Why not just remove "beta" altogether, if you're not actually performing true beta tests?

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