I have fond memories of reading magazines like PC Plus(my favourite) and PC World from the local British Library which helped me gain a good proportion of my technical knowledge during my initial days with the personal computer. Hence I am glad that PC World magazine is now available in my country starting from the month of July. I bought the first issue of it yesterday and found an interesting article at the end of the magazine: a humorous take on the spate of beta services unleashed upon the computer users by big companies like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. Here are some excerpts from the article written by Stephen Manes; go grab the magazine for the complete article.

“In keeping with the perpetually-in-beta services of companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, we hereby extend to you a warm welcome to Full Disclosure, Beta version! [...]

Emulating products such as Google Groups and Windows Defender, we intend to keep this column in beta for as long as possible. This will help us continually improve the product by passing the testing work over to you. [...]

Being beta, we can compete more aggressively with other news sources, so we are now unafraid to report – months before its release – that the final version of Windows Vista will be entirely free of security bugs. [...] And if not? Beta means never having to say you’re sorry. [...] Besides, the difference between ‘beta’ and ‘shipping’ products at Microsoft has been barely distringuishable for years.”

Moreover, the trend has also been a source of many jokes within my own circle of friends. The main reason behind such a trend, especially followed and made popular by Google, in my opinion, is the competition from the small players: you delay releasing a cutting edge service(or its updates) due to the time it takes for intensive testing of the product and some other smaller company will by then have released a “use-at-your-own-risk” version of the similar service free of cost and established a firm hold in the market. The big companies have their reputation at stake to follow the same path; so they have found an easy way out by releasing the services early but labelled as ‘beta’ so that some of the rough edges found in them do not affect the brand name of the company as these services are not the final versions; and users don’t ask any questions as they are made available free of cost. Even for the big companies, releasing stable versions of the services in the fastest possible time and keeping them free doesn’t seem to be a viable option currently.