Scoble asks what the work BETA, or more precisely BETA software means to you. He talked about stability and the out of the box experience. I’m down with that as a root cause of software coming out of the BETA stage. But what it really means is that I would probably be ready to part with money to use it.
So I think that BETA software is actually a useful tool for vendors who sell software for money. They want customers to try the software to see how it suites and drive it to a point of stability that they could charge them for it. This is good for the vendor and the customer.
On the other hand we have open source projects offering up free wares and online services like Google who label their stuff as BETA. In the case of open source software I think that they are trying to emulate the big vendors – releasing a BETA sounds important.
Online services like Google do it for a completely different reason (again – I think). Its makes marketing and PR sense. First off, using a BETA is hip and cool – for the end users – they are more likely to pipe up and say “look at the Google Suggest BETA”. The secondary benefit is that if something goes wrong they can always turn around and say ‘hey, its only a BETA, its not perfect”.