Quote:
Originally Posted by JFreak
Well not in this industry, but close. Just for kicks I will present a comparison.
Adobe CC subscription costs 71,33EUR plus VAT on monthly subscription, which means 1061,39EUR yearly with tax included (businesses can claim tax back later). And no betas. Price is from Finland, EU.
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What? Adobe no betas? Just No. How about some of the best run private and public beta programs in the world.
Adobe has massive very well run private and public beta programs. Users can download multiple public beta releases of Adobe products now, all be selecting the beta options in the Creative Cloud desktop. I have ten major beta apps available to me, and am running one of them (Photoshop) alongside the release version. Adobe also has also has large scale testing of new apps to "try things out". Right now I can download full beta versions of Apps like Photoshop or run the production releases. Folks can get easy access to beta community forums to discuss stuff just about the betas. There is extremely good outgoing comms about beta plans/goals/directions often kicked off from the annual Adobe Max conference. I can also work within those apps and use features like new ML (Machine Learning) "Neural Filter" algorithms either on the local computer or offload to cloud processing and within that Neural Filter family of features I can use released modules or beta/early access modules, include a whole process for folks to sign up to waitlists for early access to specific new filters a just fantastic way for those development teams to get direct feedback with users in a fast moving product/technology area. And there is a whole separate Photoshop and Illustrator and more "in the Web" web browser based public beta apps running now.
Former Adobe consultant and employee here (from long ago). And when we launched major new products the level of customer outreach and hand holding and early access was super impressive. Pioneering stuff with super large users/companies to pushing products out to huge individual audiences. And a wonderful technical internal culture with competent engineering teams. All some of the best I've seen or been involved in at any company. And yet when there is better innovation happening outside, Adobe being well run as a business is in a position to buy it. Some worked well, some not so (Macromedia, cough), I expect the Figma acquisition to go great.
Well run wide scale public betas of software are a super helpful part of reducing configuration management issues in production releases, maximizing useful product feedback and innovating fast while maintaining quality. The other thing modern software companies make use of is feature flagging, where the vendor can turn on and off pre-release features in released versions of software. We used that quite effectively in the early days of VMware... we also within a couple of years were running public beta programs with ~50k users in them, that scale sure helped turn up issues. Not bad for a then tiny company. I'd not want to confuse Avid with a company that is too overall competent with it's development and product management, but seeing them talk about a public beta here, I take as a good sign.