In the past couple of weeks during my testing of gOS I have come to a realization.  Many software developers don’t use their own products.  I realize that many developers may not need to utilize the products in their daily life but there needs to be some sort of daily usage.

Having worked as a Technical Analyst testing software I was under the mistaken idea that others had the same philosophy as our team, “We won’t release it until it’s perfect”.  The more and more as I test different products either for other companies or for this blog I am finding that they just want to sell software and don’t care about the end users experience.  I know it is a little naive of me to assume that everyone tries to design things to be perfect but there at least should be some sort of attempt at perfection.

There is a term used by many companies including Microsoft called “Dog Fooding”.  Basically what this means is that the products they make, they must use.  The idea is that if someone is going to be using the product they will want it to be better than everything else out there.  This is one thing I have to commend Microsoft on, even Steve Balmer is a beta tester.  If they didn’t use a product how would they know what works and what doesn’t?

The thing today that really sparked the desire in me to post this today is a comment from Alexander Wolfe of Information Week.  In his article titled “Windows 7 Beta Install Hints At Microsoft’s Planned Ship Date” he makes a statement:

“First off, I sincerely hope that no one who’s downloading the Windows 7 beta is putting it on their production machine, in place of either Vista or Windows XP. That’d be just plain dumb. It’s a beta, after all.” – Alexander Wolfe

Now not to criticize Mr. Wolfe too much but his statement is dumb.  It’s concepts like this that create bad software and bad operating systems.  I hope that people ARE using this on their production machines so they can actually find the problems with Windows 7.  No one just briefly using a piece of software is going to find the majority of bugs (unless you are Mr. Sherwood).  The software needs to be used as if it is your primary software or there is no way the bugs can be found to the level they need to be.

Now to clarify the previous statements, BACKUP YOUR DATA! If your using Windows 7 you assume some risk that your data could be lost.  Anyone foolish enough to not keep backup’s of their machine almost deserve to loose data.  I never use the actual “Documents” directories that are located within the OS, I always re-map them to either a USB/eSata drive or a separate partition.  All of my data is backed up daily via various methods to different locations.

So please, developers Dog Food your software so your end users don’t have to suffer so much.

/endrant