Two Slashes

One of the side effects of the open-source movement is that it allows unprecedented access to what were once privately-used development builds and “test-level” software not traditionally fit for or distributed in hopes of public use.

I myself have taken advantage of this situation, adding the latest builds of Firefox, Thunderbird, Witty, and other products (some well-known, some off the beaten path) to my arsenal.  And I haven’t done this out of hopes that there won’t be problems, or simply because the new versions are “expected to fix outstanding bugs” (that’s a fringe benefit, people), but more so because the latest builds are increasingly and surprisingly mature and well-tested.  (And besides that, who could resist getting all of those new features ahead of the curve? )

At one point, the words “alpha”, “beta”, “testing”, and “development” (stop me anytime) scared people away from software and service simply because the connotation those words carried was one of buggy, incomplete, untested software.  While to some people, the meaning of these words has not changed (and I can think of “a few good reasons”™), these words are being turned into extraneous, meaningless descriptors of the applications everyone uses and loves, tacked into the name much in the same way Web 2.0 “dictates” misspelled words and dropped vowels.  (Flickr anyone?)

As Justin Cox so eagerly pointed out at the end of August, G-Mail has been in beta since it was announced, and Google doesn’t seem ready to remove the label just yet, either.  My point here is that even though the concept and implementation of G-Mail is littered with reminders of its perpetual development, it is still one of the most popular web-mail platforms available today in direct contradiction to the connotations of the “beta” label.

Google is not the only company riding the “always-in-development” bandwagon, either, but they’re definitely one of the most notable, given that they’ve taken beta software to an extreme.  According to this article, almost half of the projects they have their finger in are in some non-finalized state.

While many popular applications apply the “always-updating, always-improving” philosophy, it would be great to one day leave the computer running every night, and come back to find that my operating system has updated itself and made the experience better than it was the day before, with new features and bug fixes provided in a sort of seamless transition.  Unfortunately, I don’t think this is going to happen anytime soon because it doesn’t work too well with either of Microsoft or Apple’s business models, and I don’t see them changing their behavior anytime this decade.

Ah well, I can dream*, can’t I?

*Dreaming is in beta, with an anticipated final release date of <undetermined>.