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December 11, 2004

Beta as Marketing Tool

Now it's 37 Signals turn to beat me to the punch. I was just thinking about how there have been a lot of "Betas" going on in the internet lately.

Betas used to be used primarily quietly to test your products amongst a defined universe of users before you made them public. Now the whole idea of a Beta seems to be inversed. The word has become a marketing term. It seems to be a way to build purient interest in new product, and a sense of - often very temporary or psuedo - exclusivity and scarcity. Kind of a stealth play aimed at not being stealth at all.

Of course there was gmail which is so unstealth that everyone is following it to keep up but is still in "Beta." Now there's a new Google Groups
open to the public, but Beta of course.

Google Scholar
that is for big files and PDFs and even has a tagline (stand on the shoulders of giants), but of course is Beta.

And now there is Google Suggest
that tries to read your mind (by filling in what it thinks your search might be by the popularity of all other searches).

Search engine watch says that most of Google is in Beta.

Not to be outdone, MSN has followed suit with things like MSN Spaces (blog like thing in beta) and only recently made MSN Search "public." By the time MSN search launched nothing was really new about it. Really leaves you asking what really is a launch?

Jason at 37 signals has a whole other list of seemingly perpetual betas. Neat marketing tool when this first became a trend but now you really have to wonder if the word has any meaning left. Pretty soon we will start seeing public alphas.

Posted by johnza at December 11, 2004 03:35 AM

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» beta and marketing from fundiblog
Marketing Playbook writes that marketing uses more often beta software versions as marketing tools. Why not? If you got excellent branding, those companies may gain major advantages (customer feedback, real life testing etc) and consumers see that the ... [Read More]

Tracked on December 13, 2004 11:21 AM

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