These days, economic pressure dictates that software usually has to be released long before all bugs are fixed. Perfect examples are video games that either die under the weight of their own hype after waiting too long or are released too soon and are full of bugs. It is not just a matter of adding more beta testers. Just put yourself into the shoes of a software development company. If you want to fix all bugs in a reasonable amount of time, you need to hire more testers and developers, and have them work around the clock. Which means more expenses. Which in return means a higher selling price to recoup the losses. If you don't care about time and want to release a software when it is ready, you need a lot of cash ahead of time to survive that long (and it can be a very long time). This means finding new investors - not always possible. If you wait too long, you risk to give a chance to competitors to step in and take some of your market shares. At the same time ,your own customers are unhappy that nothing new is coming - look at what happened to Bryce. If you don't wait long enough - you run the risk to leave serious bugs in your release and make people unhappy. And there is the question of new features. If you take the time to develop a lot of new features, you increase development time and the risk to introduce bugs. People have to wait and are unhappy. If you release too soon, people don't see anything new and are still unhappy. In both cases, you have unhappy people no matter what and lots of occasions to bleed cash :) Sometimes I am glad to not own a software company.

• agiel - www.linfa.net