CompuServe Messages

Jonathan, I'd like to put my two cents in on this subject, and also defend Mark from what I see as unfair criticism. As if he needs help defending himself <g>. I agree that there's nothing unethical about selling a pre-release version of software — especially if you have a zillion customers clamoring for it now. We simply don't need 1,000 beta testers and I doubt Mark does either. And by the time our own preliminary version began shipping, it was quite stable and bug free. Bugs happen with "final release" software anyway, no? Mark hasn't done anything we haven't been doing ourselves for three months. At the time Mark and I received beta copies of Visual Basic, the only folks who were truly on top of Windows programming were C programmers who had been into Windows since version 1.0 or maybe 2.0. Writing low-level code for Windows is a -lot- of work, the SDK docs are miserable, and CodeView is a quirky beast at best. As Mark pointed out recently, developing low-level code for Windows takes about five times longer than similar code for DOS. So it boils down to this: people who don't want to wait for a final version don't have to, and people that prefer to wait certainly can. In our case, we do not consider what we are shipping as being beta software in any way. And isn't shipping an early version better than having to say endlessly, "Real Soon Now" or worse, give the appearance of offering vaporware? –Ethan Winer, Crescent Software There are 2 Replies.