SaaS Blogs

“Beta”

The word somehow snuck its way into the plethora of Web 2.0 buzzwords. 

• GMail and Google Calendar!…beta. 
• Windows Live Alerts, Gallery, QnA, Soapbox, Office, and Mail!…beta. 
• Flickr!…gamma. (?) 

These services have hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users and yet they still wear the beta badge.  Some have done so for nearly 2 years.  Clearly, there is an understanding and acceptance amongst the Web 2.0 user base that these services provide service ‘as is’ with little guarantee of anything.  We’ve heard stories of Gmail accounts being wiped, for instance.  And despite this, people are banking their entire business on Office 2.0 services.

I wonder to what extent this will fly in the enterprise SaaS world, where SLAs and guarantees make or break deals on a daily basis. From the consumer standpoint, trust is everything in SaaS.  From the provider standpoint, adoption is everything.  So the question is: Would consumers trust enterprise SaaS applications that wear the beta stamp?  Is it wise for providers to open up public betas of enterprise SaaS applications, or does the trust issue become prohibitive?  Obviously a major difference here is that the services listed above are ‘free’, while enterprise SaaS applications will presumably require subscription fees right out of the gate.  I’m just looking to get a handle on the psychological aspects of using beta software in the enterprise and how that translates to the SaaS model.

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