It's time for a release date standard

Of course, you might quibble and say it always has been broken, or even go further and blame the media. Since Man took his first tentative steps in developing software, journalists have obsessed over when products would be ready in order to create news "hooks" on which to hang stories.

PR firms got a hold of this and squeezed it until the pips hurt, feeding hungry hacks with news of software codenames then alpha, beta, gold-code and release-to-manufacturing timings. Sometimes you wrote so many of these things that by the time the commercial product was available, you had lost the will to live.

PC software companies began regularly using external beta cycles way back but there was always an obvious proviso that these programs weren't for production purposes. You would run your beta of WordPerfect or 1-2-3 on a separate PC, not connected to a LAN or holding anything that you really needed. If you ran beta software you were probably in the business, a hack or a nerd. Beta software had kudos the way demo copies of records used to have. These disks contained insider knowledge.

Later, companies like Microsoft started to make their beta cycles more serious, distributing the code widely and talking publicly about how close to completion these programs were. So you installed Word 2.0 for Windows beta 3 and, if you were happy, it sometimes stayed there, even after the complete product arrived. It even became common for magazines to review beta programs although PRs would always make sure that you stated explicitly that that's what you were reviewing.

We hacks didn't help. We were complaisant in the process because we needed stories and there were pages to fill. The electronic publications weren't so bad but the print ones had a major gating factor. Come up with nowt and you had a blank page. So we wrote lots of stories about products that would come soon, were delayed, would hit deadlines, gathered or lost features, or had been scrapped altogether. Not that buyers gave a damn because it wasn't like the Beatles had reformed and made a new record. They would upgrade whenever the heck they liked.

Also, journalists started to use daft words like "shipping" as shorthand for "commercially available". It's really a pretty stupid description, conjuring images of software sitting on the open seas, dowsed to keep fresh every now and again.

What the readers wanted to know, if they cared at all, was when they could get their hands on the product, but even this got progressively trickier when the web came along. The ability to quickly upload and download large amounts of code meant that the distinction between releasing to manufacturing and commercial availability became horribly blurred.

Back when disks arrived in colourful packaging, software was a physical asset. It was 30 3.5 floppies worth of WordStar 6.0 or five CDs of Corel Draw. You knew it was available because you could see it. The RTM meant that software was still some way away from being present because there would be a chunk of time needed to stamp disks and distribute boxes.

Today, however, if you have an agreement with the software provider, the RTM date might be the same day you get your hands on the software because the docs are electronic and you don't need another box to keep that door open or desk upright.

Even for keen buyers, the actual release date didn't matter anyway because they had been on the pre-release cycle for such a long time that they knew the product backwards and were in production with the beta. And of course, the rest of the buyers didn't care because they were going to wait for another refresh cycle or new budget before they plunged in. In some ways, the release date was more of an excuse for a press release and a beano with music, crisps and streamers than anything else. However, some companies still took it seriously because their governance rules stated that the code had to be kosher.

The final madness came with web-based programs and public betas of software and the endless pre-release cycles of products such as GMail that say go-ahead-and-use-it-but-don't-blame-us-if-it-doesn't-work.

So what can we do about it?

We need to get rid of terms such as "RTM", "launching", "announcing" and "shipping". Then we have to replace them with something that says: it's available to you now if you're Rod, Jane has to wait until next week, and Freddy gets it next year, based on whether they are subscribers, non-subscribers or whatever. Finally, we have to state when it's code that's available for upload and when shrink-wrapped boxes are available.

The industry and the media have been full of it for years with regards to release dates. That has to change. µ