Alphabet Inflation and the Twitter Principle

Nice post from Brad Feld on the trend to inflate the state of software readiness:

With the rise of the Web 2.0 apps, beta became the new black and every app launched with a beta label, regardless of its maturity (e.g. a whole bunch of them were alphas.).... ....During this experience, many sites simply crash based on the sudden load as they weren't built to handle the scale or peak load.

Boom - a new invention occurred. This one is called "private beta" and now means "we are early and buggy and can't handle your scale, but we want you to try us anyway when we are ready for you." I've grown to hate this as it's really an alpha. For whatever reason, companies are either afraid to call an alpha an alpha or they don't know what an alpha is. For a web app, operational scale is an important part of the shift from alpha to beta, although as we've found with apps like Twitter, users can be incredibly forgiving with scale problems (noisy - but forgiving).

So - why not get rid of the "private beta" label and call all of these things alphas. Alphas can be private - or even public

Quite so - while it is understandable to want to rush the New New Thing out there and get the writeups early, there is nothing more offputting for potential early adopters than a service that isn't. Having said that, here in Broadsight Towers we've debated the issue of "out early + users" vs "perfect but late" and have come up with the Twitter Principle - ie it is far better to solve your problems with 2m users and $15m in the bank than to be near-perfect with no users and running out of runway. The trick is to get the right balance of just what falls over and what works at that shift from alpha to beta, which - in theory - alpha testing should have outlined..

I quite like Kosso's concept with his service Phreadz, which has just gone from Private Alfalfa to Beetroot modes - clearly getting to the root of this issue.