If you're not embarrassed when you ship your first version, you waited too long.
A new release of Plan 9 happened in June, and at about the same time a new release of the Inferno system, which began here, was announced by Vita Nuova.
The next release of mainline is going to have a lot of the advanced features people want, by the way.
There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
Microsoft knows that reliable software is not cost effective. According to studies, 90% to 95% of all bugs are harmless. They're never discovered by users, and they don't affect performance. It's much cheaper to release buggy software and fix the 5% to 10% of bugs people find and complain about.
Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the 'most reliable Windows ever.' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is 'the most articulate vegetable ever.'
Not only because the product wasn't a great product, but remember it took us five or six years to ship it. Then we had to sort of fix it. That was what I might call Windows 7.
At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups.
It's important not only to have the right timing of when the hardware is going to be released but also when we are going to be able to introduce quality software.
And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug-reports on it, you know they are just evil lies.
We've always been the development project that lived in a time pressured setting and always where commercial entities were relying heavily on releases in a certain time frame.
We plan to support Exchange 2003 as soon as it is released. We already have the prerelease versions from MSDN.
When we got ready to ship out Firefox 1.0, the last set of things we did was to make it appealing to a consumer, to add the polish of a world-class product to it.
After releasing Mono 1.0, we started work on a new edition of Mono that will be released later in the year.
I got bitten by the free software bug in February of 1998 around the time of the Mozilla announcement.
Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
Release early and often.
Companies often visit my office, or invite me to theirs, to brief me on new products, Web sites, or software before they are released - usually a few weeks or days ahead of time. I don't review most of these products.
We ship a new version of Google Play Services every six weeks. Typically, 90 percent of users are on the new version of that.
The Windows 95 launch was such an incredible experience.
Mac OS X Tiger will come out long before Longhorn.
Organizations want small changes in functionality on a more regular basis. An organization like Flickr deploys a new version of its software every half hour. This is a cycle that feeds on itself.
Cosmoe is nearing the stage where I would feel comfortable doing a preliminary release aimed at developers.
