Redmond Beta: FUBAR Defined

Quick — what’s the difference between M$ beta and say, Google beta or Firefox beta?

Got it in one, kids: for as long as they’ve done it (and let’s face it, Win 3.1 was functionally alpha and beta for years before a truly working live version was in place, so this goes back a long, long way) — Microsoft has bumbled beta with a brutal consistency.

Google releases everything it makes in beta — often (as in Gmail) for years before a live release appears; yet by and large, it works. Mozilla’s products, having the benefit of thousands of open-source community testers, seem to flourish even in early betas. Even Apple, certainly no past master of beta software, got Safari’s beta release relatively functional before dropping it onto unsuspecting Windows users.

Only Microsoft seems so utterly incapable of producing beta that mildly responds to the weakest expectations of end users. Witness the scenario captured in the graphic above: for days now, IE 8 beta has been unable to open iGoogle without throwing an error and crashing. That’s iGoogle! Firefox 3, on the other hand, has effortlessly loaded the same page from beta 2 onwards (and probably before that, but I’m just going by what I’ve seen from the time I joined the release stream).

I would call this phenomenon bizarre, but the more appropriate epithet is “Bushian.” That combination of arrogance and incompetence, the essence of the Bush presidency, has long had its corporate counterpart in Redmond. Sometimes I swear Bush and Ballmer are in a competition to have their pictures featured in the dictionary next to the listing for FUBAR.

I’d say there’s room for them both in there.