

You Release Late and Infrequently - liebke
http://measuringmeasures.blogspot.com/2010/01/you-release-late-and-infrequently.html

======
decode
Just this weekend I watched Machinima.com's documentary series on the history
of Valve Software:

[http://www.machinima.com/film/view&id=42271](http://www.machinima.com/film/view&id=42271)

One of the common themes in the series is Valve's frequent choice to delay
shipping in order to get things right. Gabe Newell says something like, "Your
software is late for a while, but it's bad forever." As far as I can tell,
this has worked extremely well for them.

Which makes me wonder what the difference is between Valve's games and Gmail.
I think it has something to do with their games being about experiential
storytelling, and Gmail is a tool to accomplish tasks. I imagine most software
falls somewhere on a spectrum between the "tool" and "experience" endpoints
and I wonder if other software besides games might be hurt more than helped by
"release early and often."

~~~
smokinn
The difference is that valve's software has to have a build installed on the
client's computer or worse, a disk you shove into a console.

On the web, your releases update 100% of your client base instantly.

Though I do agree that depending on your market, "release early and often" can
hurt you. Getting a bad reputation early can be hard to shrug off later.

~~~
DougBTX
It's not just the medium. A game with plot and direction won't be the same
when replayed. Imagine someone trying to repeat a joke to make it sound
funnier, when you've already heard the punch line. So, danger of over-
generalisation, but certainly games like TF2 can be improved with updates,
extensions rather than revisions.

Perhaps that's his point about bugs vs new features. Releasing often works
when you are adding more good bits, not so much when fixing broken bits that
should never have been released in the first place.

------
gurraman
On frequent releases: I absolutely love that there's a new interface tweak
almost every time I login to my GitHub account.

~~~
bradfordcross
yea, although a couple of the tweaks have ended up tweaking me out when i
can't find something. :-)

------
10ren
Wikipedia has links that go nowhere.

But it does still sound a bit dodgey, I think because to get accurate
feedback, you necessarily need to fool people. For example, if you had a link
that stated it was a proposed feature, it would affect the clickrate. Or maybe
it wouldn't? Maybe interest would be enough. Perhaps this could be
experimentally tested.

~~~
dstorrs
Personally, I think I would feel ok about putting the link up and having it go
simply to a landing page that said "This feature is still in production.
Please comment below on how we could best suit it to your needs."

------
ntoshev
I also feel it's a breach of trust when you mislead the users you have
implemented something in order to test demand. Never mind the ethics, it seems
it doesn't always work:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=960721>

------
wingo
I was about to raise the point that "release early, release often" is a phrase
from free software, and wonder at its appropriation by commerce, but it turns
out it's from ESR. Perhaps it is appropriate, then.

(The majority of my hack is not for customers.)

------
omouse
The Wufoo example is awful. Shouldn't have taken more than 5 min for them to
realize, "HEY the Flash experience on GNU/Linux sucks! Maybe we shouldn't use
it so that we can have more customers use the thing!"

Those 3 versions of GMail could have been one version that was most useful.
There was no time constraint for it since it was a side-project.

The links to nowhere sounds like a good idea except I don't think it indicates
interest in the feature being built. A link's text is usually very short and
you don't really get any demographics from a click. If you knew 15 to 20 yr
olds were clicking a link but the rest of the site was mainly used by 30 to 40
yr olds, you might want to spin out the link as a separate site instead of
just a new feature or something. But how do you know how interested people
really are? :/

~~~
unfoldedorigami
Actually, it turned out that the complaints coming from Linux users about
Flash being used in Wufoo in the early prototype was disproportionate to the
future demographics of our actual customers and so it honestly didn't make any
difference in terms of our revenue today based on our current application
usage. I think Linux users account for less than 2% of our user base.

In retrospect, a good number of those complaints came from Reddit users when
we were just getting out the door. Our startup was only a few weeks old then
and I have to say that the feedback felt overwhelming.

In the end, the decision to remove Flash in the builder was a good one because
it resulted in a much simpler interface that was easier to use, but to say
that it should have been obvious or that it really mattered, would be
overstating it.

~~~
omouse
Then the Wufoo example is mistated in the blog. The feedback was useful for
deciding on interface changes but not useful for deciding on
platform/technology changes which is what it seems to imply.

So I'll change what I said...It shouldn't have taken you more than 5 min to
realize that GNU/Linux users wouldn't have been a huge percentage of your
users and you could have gotten away with ignoring their advice on
Flash/Javascript.

It's a good case against releasing early and asking for feedback...you have no
idea if the market segment using your product is the one you will be
targetting in a few months.

~~~
ntoshev
So the conclusion you think is _obvious_ changes after you get more data, but
you still think the data are not important for reaching that conclusion?

