Eternal Beta Testing

The first version of Windows that I tried (but didn't keep) was somewhere down in revision 2.x. It wasn't until version 3.1 that I found it to be of any use at all, ...but I've been upgrading ever since.

What Bill Gates gave to the world wasn't an operating system, however. He gave the world permission to run the software game so that your entire market ends up eternally locked into beta testing.

Windows 7 has been announced this week.

It isn't that I find it so utterly insane that I can't deal with it anymore, it's more like the feeling of people reaching into my wallet every day before I even have a chance to put anything into it.

Once upon a time, software was looked at as a product that would be developed, tested, and ultimately arrive into users' hands as a finished product. With the Bill Gates business model, however, you never actually got a finished product... ever.

In fact, if the product ever DID get finished, they discontinued it completely!

Disk Operating System, version 6.x, for instance, is a finished product.

Part of the problem behind eternal beta testing, of course, is the rapidity of hardware advances over the years. You could, literally, set the versions of DOS and Windows to a timeline of which hardware architecture each iteration of the software would run best on.

I ran through a bunch of different hardware platforms before Windows even showed up on the radar. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. I still have my Commodore 64 downstairs in a box, stored right beside my Compaq Model One.

When I was looking downstairs a while ago for old install disks to take pictures of, this was one of the first vintage disk sets that I found.

CompuServe was THE place to dial into, back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, before the internet took off and the World Wide Web rolled onto it. Everything was dialup, and there were endless lists of telephone numbers for servers that people had set up in their houses, running bulletin board systems.

Anybody remember Davey Jones Locker, which was run out of Millbury? I knew Rick before he even bought those computers, when he was selling and repairing CB radios out of an apartment on Diamond Street in Worcester...

Well, those days of something new every few months have never really ended, when you really take a look at it. As consumers, we've all been involved, no matter how long, in this great big, never-ending adventure of eternal beta testing.