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Expectations of Free and Beta/Alpha Services
This morning phone replacement GrandCentral (owned by Google) was down. Several blogs reported on the issue. It appears the service is back up now but no word yet on what caused the outage.
GrandCentral is listed as a "beta" and it's also a "free" service. What should we expect for a service in beta or a service that is considered live but is free? I printed business cards with my GrandCentral number on them. Was this a mistake to trust a service in beta? When Skype was down, they too handled the outage poorly - they blamed Microsoft.
Twitter for example is free and not in beta. It's been down a good bit (though more stable now) and we've all bitched and moaned about their downtime. With a service that apparently has no revenue model yet, is downtime allowed? If so, how much?
What I'd like to see is an expectations document (i.e. a contract) that explains what can be expected from a startup. I am guessing these documents would need a legal stamp but they would be very effective for setting guidelines and customer expectations.
Lastly, for any service that we rely on (e.g. GrandCentral, AIM, Skype) these services should have a status page that we can monitor at any time. Non-essential services (e.g. Google search, Mahalo, CenterNetworks) a status page isn't required but an explanation of any outages would be beneficial.
Check out our interview with GrandCentral Founder Craig Walker along with his top tips for startups.
The notion of using the word "beta" for web applications is completely ridiculous now. They might as well be throwing up "under construction" GIF's.
Your site is always evolving and improving. You're always working out bugs and kinks, regardless of if it's Beta, Alpha, Pre-Alpha, or Version 12.
Since "Beta" sites could encompass anywhere from a handful to millions of users, I don't think it's possible to define clear rules as to what's expected in a Beta product. For a given company, it comes down to how mission-critical the userbase of a given product (regardless of its beta status) is to the product's success.
For instance, when Gmail was being beta tested internally, if something blew up it wouldn't affect their customer base. They could even axe the whole project without any real consequence.
But now, countless people and businesses rely on Gmail for their businesses and livelihoods-- and bugs, security flaws, and downtime would be serious problems now, regardless of the fact that Gmail is in Beta.
It's time for us to drop this "beta" business. Call it "beta" when you're testing it internally. When you have thousands of people using your service, it's time to face the fact that you're selling a finished product, perfect or not.
Allen,
Before using GrandCentral as the main number for my business, I read their "terms of service". It was pretty clear that I shouldn't be doing so:
The GrandCentral Services are for personal, non-commercial usage. GrandCentral reserves the right to immediately disconnect or modify a Subscriber's Service if GrandCentral determines, in its sole discretion, that Subscriber's use of the Service is, or at any time was, inconsistent with normal personal, non-commercial usage patterns.
Regardless, I did choose to start using it to receive business calls because so many others seemed to be doing so. So, you're far from alone. Best of luck and I hope the outages don't hurt you in any way.
Kind regards,
Justis Peters
It seems to me that Google slaps beta on everything they do. I think in this new web 2.0 world people have "beta blindness." You see it everywhere. You even see it on some products which never HAD an alpha. I think it is reasonable to be upset if a service you depend on (like GC) goes down without word.
I like that Beta Blindness - goes along with what Tony said about everything being a beta.
Once acquired by Google, no longer a startup, but a Google service.
I'm not sure I'd say that's entirely true. Once the acquisition is fully completed and all employees/servers, etc, have been integrated, etc, then yes.