The is an interesting article on zdnet today entitled A long winding road out of beta. In the article Paul Festna comments on the fact that a lot of companies are now performing the Beta stage of software development in public and for a long period of time.

I think that Paul is missing the point here about what the Beta in “Beta Software” really means. I do agree that in the classic software development process the beta stage could be described some what like this:

The beta version, named for the second letter of the Greek alphabet, typically refers to the second stage of software testing. Traditionally distributed to a limited group of testers, it follows the alpha version, which is tested in the lab

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