The term "perpetual beta" sums up an important feature of web based applications: You can roll out updates as often as you want and all users immediately profit from it.
But once a site attracts a non-trivial userbase, this might also be its achilles heel: It can be hard and risky to impose major updates on your regular users. Sure, you can add a major set of new features, but that leads down to the path of complicated sites. But if you want to progress by changing how a current feature works, then you can get yourself in trouble. To limit risk, only small changes are considered. Which is smart for many other reasons, too, of course.
But what if the web around you progresses and a major shift of course is in due? What if your userbase is nicely in the early and late majority. With shrink-wrapped software you could jump on the next curve with the next release, sell it to the early adopters and give the rest some time to get comfortable.
You can't really do that with a website. Sure, you could add a special beta section an run that in parallel, but only real innovators go there and you'd have to keep it separated quite a long time, would loose even more power to keep the majority of users and if your site has social aspects cut out the the network effects.
So, you have a choise: Stay at the top of major shifts and risk alienating the most faithful users or eventually get caught up from behind by a competitor starting from scratch or coming from another field.
It was impossible for Yahoo to radically cut down their Homepage when the early adopters rallied around Google. Even now, their AJAXified Mail (guess why it is taking so long since the oddpost acquisition!) will keep all major principle in place. Gmail was able scrap folders and replaces them with tags.
If you understand german, you can watch the dilemma in the comments of the immo.search.ch launch. While it was in beta, there were 100+ mostly positive comments, in fact extremly positive. Once it was officially launched, that is, it replaced the old immo.search.ch - a pretty standard form -> resultspage -> detailpage type site - by a new ajax-centric site, old users took the general tone in a very negative direction. They want the old system back. They obviously copy arguments, which you can easily spot: One user mentions an actually quite obscure bug that appears when you search for a house to rent (and not a house to buy or a flat to rent, the majority cases) and that was also present in the previous version, as it is bogus data not code. But it serves them as an argument, so they use it. Fascinating to watch the dynamic in the comments.
Now search.ch is bold enough to hold to the new concept. They believe that it is a genuinly new appraoch that will ultimately beat the older system. But the real estate search was never a really important for search.ch, so they can take the risk. The commenters in the blog are probably a vocal minority and I would guess that a reasonable part of the current users will stay and even spread the word. But even if the complete userbase would have to be replaced with this step, the payoff vs risk made sense.
But not so for the other big real estate sites. For them, the current userbase is one of the core assets. And every step that might piss off a good part of it is a bet-the-company step. At the same time, they will surely loose users to immo.search.ch and other companies that are freeer do innovate in bolder steps. The best would probably be to time the transition to a new paradigma to a sweet spot where they can still get back a couple of users and really keep some so far loyal users that at least saw the new style and probably get used to it and the users they would loose are on balance. But they will come out hurt one way or the other.
Shrink-wrapped software with its granular update cycles and a self-adopting userbase don't know any such risks. Only to miss out an important change of direction, i.e. to not innovate enough.
So what could a site do, that built its success over the years with a model that is bound to be replaced over the next couple years? Are there any good examples where a site mastered a difficult transition in a fine way? What could be done by clever communication in advance and during the transition?
(All of that assumes that you know what you do and don't innovate in the wrong direction. That of course is whole different topic to analyze. For small steps in the wrong direction that perpetual beta is actually more forgiving - if you see the signs early enough. And you see them correctly, which is not easy: Just go and read the comments in the search.ch blog entry linked above)
Tags: innovation disruption ajax
Posted by seefeld at February 6, 2006 12:07