You’re right about the badness of leaving important defects in the 1.0 release that people have actually paid for, and then never coming back to fix them. That’s uncool.

This was the problem we have had a few times. We’d get so wrapped up in launching a site, that we’d rush things under the excuse “We’ll fix it in 1.1″ but that never happens. It ends up out there, broken, and (sometimes) abandoned.

It’s a matter of investment. Don’t ask people if they like chocolate; go find out how much chocolate they actually buy and eat. My impression is that it has nothing in particular to do with macroeconomics. People are just really bad at knowing and reporting their actual values and priorities. It’s like New Year’s resolutions, right? Do you want to get in shape? Sure! Did I see you at the gym today? Hah! The people who buy and try your product are the ones actually at the gym.

You raise a good point about proprietary capabilities, but you know what though? I don’t think I’ve ever seen, up close, a really good idea that lost out because it wasn’t secret enough. People tend to overestimate how amazing and world-changing their idea is on its own; they underestimate how important it is to make it work and how hard it is to deliver. And they often miscalculate how much the market cares about the problem their product purports to solve.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by MarkWSchumann: Your Version 1.0 sucks. Do you ship it anyway? It depends. New blog post: http://bit.ly/8GwrVx...

The trend is based on a desire to get quicker, earlier feedback from real customers instead of surveys, focus groups, etc. It is one thing to ask somebody “If I could provide a piece of software that would do everything for $1000 would you buy it?”, and actually showing them the software with an offer to buy it right then. As soon as you stick your hand out with a request for money, it has gone beyond research and you now have velocity to get real feedback. I for one like this approach, but I wonder what is causing it? I cannot help but think that the economic struggles are driving people to seek real results now, instead of vaporware promises.

The Agile methodology generates this type of capability, because now you have something to show that can be touched, tasted, felt, and on occasion kicked (as opposed to a document). While I see a clear difference between the release to a business team that may represent the end users or customers, it is not as far of a stretch now to release to customers.

The results can be great, and I assume nobody willingly releases what they know to be dangerous software (your point 4 above – “oops, sorry we deleted all the contents of your disk when you saved that file”). So as long as the software (or product) is fairly well baked, the bigger concerns I would have is losing any advantage of proprietary capabilities by releasing an early version product that allows others to catch up at a point sooner in an industry’s maturation process.