Do Software Versions Really Matter? 693
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a rather large software company and I am currently working on a completely new product. So new in fact, that the official name has not even been decided. I had assumed that the version number for this product would be 1.0 (at most). However recently I learned that the Product Managers want to release this NEW product with a version number somewhere between 5.0 and 8.0 because 'there is a stigma about buying 1.0 products. People assume it's no good.' This latest Dilbert-esque comedy routine nearly sent me over the edge. So to gauge my sanity against that of the upper Product Management, I ask the community: Do version numbers play a role in software decisions, or have product version numbers lost all credibility and meaning? Would the community feel comfortable buying version '6.3' software (and paying tens of thousands of dollars for it) knowing that it was the first release of the product?"
Larry Ellison did this with Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
See: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9814858-7.html
When Oracle began selling its first commercial SQL relational database management system in 1978, which version was first officially released?
A: Version 1.0
B: Version 2.0
C: Version 3.0
Answer: Version 2.0. There was never a 1.0 version. Said Ellison: "Who'd buy a version 1.0 from four guys in California?"
1.5.3.21 (Score:2, Interesting)
I have seen purchasing decisions based on version... but usually it has less to do with what the version number is, and more to do with how long the version has been on the market. If a version 1.0 was just launched, unless there was a large business case for taking the risk of buying it, the company I work for would wait until 1.1 (or until 1.0 had been on market long enough to prove itself stable). Same goes for upgrades, a new release of a product is not moved to unless there is a large business case for the move (or the version has been on the market long enough).
What's long enough? Depends on the vendor and their release cycle.
Just look at OrCAD (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's just the opposite for me (Score:1, Interesting)
Obviously you don't know software programs very well. Any .0 release came easily have lots of bugs maybe even more than previous generations because it will have most likely new features. New Features mean new bugs.
Just look at Windows. The new the version the more bugs.
The change list (Score:2, Interesting)
If I see a version-greater-than-one of something, I'll take a look at the change list and see how quickly new features get added, or bugs get resolved.
So if I see a high version number and no history, I see a scam.
I don't go for scams. I prefer to report them to the local authorities.
What are you really doing? (Score:3, Interesting)
The name of a product is a marketing decision, period. The version numbers that make sense to you as developer of the product, at best, mean nothing to the buyers of the product. At worst, well, your own example about "1.0" is perfect.
You need to have some internal scheme for keeping track of builds and versions of your product for release management and support issues, but there's no sense in having engineers decide whether a given release is 2.5 or 3.0. Let marketing pick the name that's most meaningful to buyers.
Re:It's just the opposite for me (Score:5, Interesting)
However, the question was version 1 verses a higher version (such as version 6). It was not concerning version 6.0 verses 6.1 or 6.2 for example. Of course, they seem to be considering taking the fudging one step further (instead of version 1.0, use version 6.3), so what you say is still relevant from the perspective of fooling the naive customer. Still not a good way to start off a business relationship.
Re:It's just the opposite for me (Score:3, Interesting)
To be fair, I've used software that had version numbers like 0.99989389 for years and years only to find it more useful than the alternatives.
And I'm using Firefox 3 when there's obviously an Internet Explorer 8 that should be 5 times better!
Re:Slashdot might not be the best place to ask (Score:3, Interesting)
In my experience, with OSS 1.0 tends to mean "we completely ripped out all the old stable code in favor of new unstable code, and we changed the user interface. But don't worry, we expect it to be stable again around 1.4.x. Also, the 0.x series is now considered deprecated, all links to it on our website have been removed.".
/Mikael
Re:Version 7 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why Do You Care? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sort of depends on who the customers are.
There was once this software company that wanted to redo its image. Its primary market was supposedly average folks. So they made an ad campaign that relied on some aging comedian and the former CEO of the company and talked about shoes. At the end of the ad, the CEO wriggles his ass at the audience. It didn't go over very well.
Sometimes marketing folks do know their target audience. In the case of another computer company, their target audience was primarily creative folks. I.e., the people they were marketing to were just like the marketers themselves. So there was obviously a lot that the marketers knew about what would appeal to their audience.
The problem with in-house marketing is that you tend to forget your customers. If you have a great product you can probably sell it to anyone. If your product is a relative commodity, then marketing has to be spot on.
Look at GM, for example. Their management seems to believe that their target audience should be people who grew up in the riotous Sixties (based on their current throwback, er, retro designs). So they have a lot of vehicles that look like they were plucked from Bullit or old Starsky and Hutch reruns. To sell these vehicles to the 20-somethings and 30-somethings that are driving now, they need to make a 40 year old look seem fresh. Tough job.
Not just a software problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why Do You Care? (Score:3, Interesting)
Most 20 somethings I know of would love a 40 yr old looking Vette or one of the other power player cars that GM makes.
Oh, I'd agree.. I'd love a 40year old Vette. Much the same way I would love a vintage Atari 520ST. However, I don't want a 2008 Vette that looks like a 1968 Vette.
Re:It's just the opposite for me (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not surprised, because I don't see MS's use of "Windows 7" as an about-face.
Back in the day, us Value Added Resellers would toss out the MS DOS v4.5 disks that came as part of the Win3.x package and load the last reliable version, MS DOS 3.3, before putting Win3.11 on top of it. But then DR DOS v6 came along, the Microsoft engineers abdicated their responsibility to the MS marketeers, and MS DOS v7 came out at the same time DR DOS upgraded to v7. Jumping over a bunch of unused version numbers to do so (AIR, it went from DOS v5.5 to DOS v7.0, with essentially no core changes but additional third party add-ons that MS had bought up and jumbled into the DOS package).
I was one of the many West Coast VARs who started offering customers more choices at that point:
So with "Windows v7", it looks to me like MS is simply doing a rerun of a cute move they had once done when Ballmer was a younger man who had something he could dance about.
Re:just a symptom (Score:3, Interesting)
Here you're ignoring the argument of my post, which is that you can tell whether it's good becauese you can install it for free, and test it as much as you like.
If that's your argument, then it's really weak. Why didn't you even bother to address the fact that much closed-source software (probably most) come with trials, demos, or free versions?
You argument appears to be based on a lie. Yes, I can install and test proprietary software before I commit to buy. If the software is crap, I won't buy it. Don't you think that potential sales are a good incentive for companies to write non-crap proprietary software?
Re:It's just the opposite for me (Score:5, Interesting)
Funny enough, one of the causes of the Microsoft and IBM divorce was Microsoft demanding to move the video subsystem to ring 0 in OS/2 v1.3. IBM refused in the interests of stability.
I was always kind of surprised that it took so long for Microsoft to sacrifice stability for speed with NT. I was not surprised at how long it took for them to realize they were wrong.
Re:It's just the opposite for me (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently the official reason that the NT kernel's version number isn't being bumped to 7.0 is for backward compatibility. You know, for all those legacy Vista apps that won't work if the first character of the NT kernel version number isn't '6'.
Yeah, it seems like a pretty weak argument to me too.
Compromise and ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Another route to go is to use version numbers that are not obviously in sequence [1.0
I think they matter (Score:3, Interesting)
1.0 6.3? (Score:3, Interesting)
I would check the software history first.
If the software history is short (in your example, it does not exist at all!) so the updates does not bring lots of fixes (if there is lots of bugs) or new features (if such are needed), I would not buy such software.
If I would really need your software, and there is no competitor, I could then buy it... mayby!
But lying for customers even in VERSION numbering... it is very stupid. I would say to your marketing people to grow up and stop lying for customers, because they are the "thing" what keeps you up and going. Play nice, be honest and respect the truth.
Even that no one cant say that how much you need to update your software, until you can change one of the X.y.z numbers, but it would be very stupid if just one "normal" feature would grow up version X+1.
I just dont trust corporations if they try to cheat me by using marketing in wrong way. It is very dirty trick and I take it as offence against me and deal is off.
the version number is not the problem (Score:2, Interesting)
> have product version numbers lost
> all credibility and meaning?
to me, commercial software companies have lost all credibility and meaning, and that's the real problem.
I already expect that they will not deliver carefully engineered products, but throw the first thing that compiles on the market, and then just see what happens (that's v1.0). Many products are broken by design and are implemented carelessly, so they have a lot of bugs. But actually, if version 1.0 isn't good, then in all probability version 5.0 will not be much better - because you can't fix a broken design with workarounds. Version 5.0 may even be worse than 1.0 - because if the implementation is really bad, noone knows what's really going on in that code - so you may fix one error and introduce two new, more complex errors with your workaround.
On the other hand, if you can proove, that your product has a good design and is implemented correctly, I don't care about the version number - I'd even use a version 0.32 in a production environment.
Pick a Sensible Scheme and Stick With It (Score:3, Interesting)
Pick a sensible version numbering scheme and stick with it.
My personal favorite is x.y.z, where x is incremented at major rewrites and when incompatible changes are introduced, y is incremented when new features are added, but backward compatibility is preserved, and z is incremented for maintenance releases that don't add features and don't break compatibility (except when caused by buggy behavior, of course).
This way, you can tell that your configuration file for version 1.1.0 will work on version 1.1.1 and version 1.2.0, but not necessarily on 2.0.1, and that if someone is running 1.1.0 when 1.1.1 is already out, they may be running into bugs that have been fixed since.
Whether you, as a user, trust a given version number to represent a reliable piece of software is, of course, entirely subjective. It is wise to remember, though, that there is software with 0.6 version numbers that is rock solid, and software with 9.0 version numbers that is junk. More or less the only thing that can reliably be deducted from version numbers is that higher numbers indicate newer versions of the software. A version number doesn't say anything about how good the product is.
Re:It's just the opposite for me (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm intrigued, why does Google Calculator not agree?
A dumb mistake plus a typo. I forgot to actually multiply by e at the end when I evaluated it.
sqrt(8/15)*sqrt(1/sqrt(2)) = 0.516
sqrt(8e/15)*sqrt(1/sqrt(2)) = 0.851
The 2nd term also was off because of a parenthesis mismatch. It should have been:
sqrt(8e/15)(1/sqrt(2)) + (sqrt(8e/15)((1/sqrt(2))i))
which evaluates to:
0.851 + 0.851i
-cheers