If you remember a while back, I wrote all about the ways that software companies name releases and what they really mean.  Then I started thinking about all the ways companies release products without actually letting you get them.  You’ve heard it before: a big release announcement followed by questions about availability that never get answered.  I thought I’d take a moment to decode a few of them for you.

Early Field Trials – This thing is still broken.  We thought we fixed all the bugs but when we let someone outside the company install it they managed to screw it up.  So we gave it to three of our biggest customers and parked an engineer in their office for the next six months to iron out all the bugs.  No, you can’t buy it.  We don’t make enough money from you to justify parking one of our people in your office.  Check back next year.

New Product Hold – Buy our stuff! We released it and you can order it.  But we don’t think it’s quite ready for production.  Plus, we want to make sure you aren’t going to install it wrong and make us look bad.  So we’re going to make you ask for permission to buy something from us.  We’ll give it to you with the understanding that you can only install it on these two platforms on the second Tuesday in July.

Generally Available – We had to release it before our CEO went on stage.  You can order it, but we haven’t actually built any of them yet.  So while it’s available, it will still take another three months for it to get to you.  We hope to have all our supply chain issues sorted out just in time for it to become obsolete.

Expanded Release – We farmed the manufacturing out to some third world country to get this thing into stores.  The quality is going to be pretty dodgy until we can get our own facilities up to snuff.  Good luck on these things lasting more than three months.  In fact, we’re probably going to exclude these from any kind of warranty or support.  It’s cheaper that way.

Continuous Release – Bigger numbers are better, right?  Instead of waiting to release it, we’re just pushing every nightly build down to you.  The release number doesn’t even mean anything any more.  What’s a version?  Oh, and we’re going to break things right and left.  If you’re in the beta channel then abandon all hope now.

Tom’s Take

I bet you all have some funny ones as well.  Leave them in the comments!