I Wishta Vista
The other day we received our beta copies of Windows Vista Beta 2. Now available for a limited time, apparently. I was asked, "Are We Going to Mess With This?!" Yes, even the capital letters were enunciated.
I said, "No Robert is our guinea pig."
The closing of the doors is an interesting way to limit the open beta process. It's a bit less friendly, but also less directed than the invite route popular with everything else. Where one might think "invite" means they are truly special. It's not really special, it's just another game.
Almost always now, if I hear about something that isn't released yet and I don't have an invite to it, I'll pester a few friends and get "in". But getting "in" to a beta period in the Web 2.0 world is about as hard as finding drugs in San Francisco. You don't really have to know where to look - just how to look.
With Microsoft's beta download period, their scarcity isn't based on a network or on strengths of contacts - but on people's ability to download within a time frame. One could suppose that this means that the level of competence of people who have downloaded Windows Vista Beta 2 reflects the open gate approach - as opposed to the friends and colleagues networks engendered through an invite process seeded initially by people the company has some reason to trust.
While both use false scarcity to build "excitement" (whoo!), I'm wondering if the Vista beta isn't going to leave Microsoft with a less desirable beta group.
Photo: Ana Golpe
Technorati: Windows Vista, invites, false scarcity, whoo!
Guinea pig, eh? Where's my Peets card?
Posted by: Robert W. Anderson | 30 June 2006 at 13:10