all talk and no action

There's an interesting article on the Wall Street Journal site that asks why software stays in beta for so long:

"I can't come up with anything else in the entire marketing world where marketers knowingly introduce a flawed or inadequate product [and] it helps grow your user base,"said Peter Sealey, a marketing professor at the University of California at Berkeley and former chief marketing officer at Coca-Cola Co.

Google News, the article reminds us, has now been in beta for three years.

It's not just free, web-based services that are being released to the public without full functionality. I bought an MP3 player last year with the promise that firmware to make it capable of playing PlaysForSure DRM-protected music would be available within a couple of months. A year later and there's still no sign of the firmware. Another MP3 player I looked at earlier this year claimed on the box that the small screen could also play QuickTime movies. Only it couldn't. That functionality, too, will be delivered with the next firmware upgrade, apparently.