Swordfish.
James Robertson: Being on, 24x7:
Which gets to a basic problem in the always on world that we have now - limited access betas are mostly pointless now. Why? Well, look at this whole dust up. Someone complained about toolbars disappearing. Afraid of the Kryptonite effect, Scoble raced out with a bunch of posts (and, according to the Register, a few emails). In the meantime, most of us don't have access to the product in question. To us, this looks like a bewildering array of charges, counter-charges, and explanations. Heck, The Register accuses Scoble of dishonesty.
There are a few possible fixes here, I think. One is, don't do limited access betas at all. If you intend to make a beta publicly available, then make it widely available. Otherwise, you'll get what you see here - lots of commentary being slung over the heads of the unwashed masses.
I don't get limited betas. Maybe it's the insidious influence of the business side, but I find it hard to reconcile increasingly shrill cries for "transparency" with the double super secret nda mentality so rampant in the industry. Tech loves elitism - invite-only conferences, coy references to insider access, closed betas. Said betas ALWAYS make it out into the wild anyway; I'd be surprised if you can't already get the IE 7 beta on the file-sharing networks. It's pretty much proven that such cloak-and-dagger bullshit is at best annoying and worst ineffectual.
So why does the disconnect continue? My educated guess would be the relationship (read "collusion") between the tech industry and its customers, typically corporate IT departments. Tech really has a 2-level customer base: IT and the "unwashed masses." The unwashed get pretty much no insider access whatsoever. IT does; it's pretty much ALL inside baseball. Blogging, especially the Scoble-type "I'm not an amateur pundit, but I simulate one on-line" variety, gives it the veneer of being out in some undefined "open," even though I can't really tell you why right now. What's strange is that many of these "conversations" could be conducted via email; quite often there's little or no benefit to the people not directly involved. But if you did it over "private" channels you couldn't refer to yourself as a "revolutionary." A corporate revolutionary. Jesus. That's right up there with "military intelligence."