#250 Beta Master

America has a love affair with mediocrity. We have almost never, given the choice of the final two candidates, elected the smarter one president. We eat at McDonalds, even when the mom and pop burger joint next door has better product and better flavor. Starbucks isn’t the best coffee around, it’s just the best-marketed coffee around. We say a product in its testing phase is the beta version. I’m curious about the origin of that designation—it’s not finished yet, it has some bugs, it’s the beta version. We’re having people use it and test it (for free) and get back to us with feedback about how it could be better. Why “beta?” You’d think the first version would be alpha. Greek A,B,Cs: Alpha, Beta, Gamma. Is there any relation to how the Beta video format tanked so badly? If they had tested it better first with the general public they never would have gone to market? The videotape wars of the eighties saw VHS, not Beta, emerge the master. Beta was clearly technically superior, yet the mushy video of VHS caught on cause it was faster to market, cheaper and yes, mediocre with a capital M. The capital M being marketing. Not the capital M in Mac. But the same capital M used by Microsoft. Microsoft knew that despite a few bugs you need to get a new and flashy product out there and if you had to steal something like, say, icon-based interfaces, why, you’d could just lift them from the competition. Your icons are intuitive too, and you can’t copyright intuition right? The new Windows could be strapped over the top of MS-DOS and the computer challenged public could care less. Until they got the dreaded blue screen and their computer locked up tighter than a lug nut on an old wheel. Then just say the next version would be that much beta, excuse me, better. Then charge them for the new one, and then charge them for the upgrade, and the fix, and the fix of the upgrade and soon Mac would be back there clunking along with perfect computer and a 1% market share cause all the Windows-based performance-challenged PCs would be clogging up everyone’s office already. So what brought Mac back? Another example of American mediocre ingenuity. The Ipod. The Ipod is catchy, it’s cool, and when all is said and done, it’s Mp3. Which, in a nutshell, is crappy audio. But it’s fast crappy audio. You can upload it and download it and generally consume it like a Big Mac in a drive-thru lane. The other Big Mac, Apple, finally caught on. In order to be a successful company you have to appeal to the masses. And the masses, unfortunately, have mass taste. Take the highs and the lows and the in-betweens and you have average. Remember what that was in school? If you’ve always wondered why the public tests the B version instead of the A version, now you know. The market version is the C version. C comes after B. And C is average.
America, ya gotta love it.