It's Beta So Give It A Break

The purpose of Beta software is to break it. Companies release the imperfect, likely to crash, may not work perfectly software to the world so users of all kinds can find things wrong with it.

It's not meant to do everything right, and as a matter of fact, it better not. If it did, it would be ready for prime time.

Today's Skype launch, widely chronicled by many smarter than I, may be significant, because as a "point" release vs. an intermediate update there will be lots of new features tossed out, in theory.

The big thing with 3.0 appears to be the plug ins. This is something Yahoo has been doing with Yahoo Communicator now for some time and even Microsoft has had around with Outlook. Skype 3.0 will also sport a newer updated look some say. But most of all, its just supposed to be better.

Ted has little to say, which makes me wonder if there's much more than a prettier look and the plug ins, plus the group chat feature (yawn) that's really new..

But, tell me this oh wise ones if it is better, why has the quality of Skype calls in the past few days dropped off. Ken Rutkowski and I have for the past year or more used Skype to record the daily World Technology RoundUp. Yesterday, the sound quality of Skype was so bad, and we were using the same set ups we always do. The packet loss and jitter was horrible, yet, when we switched to GizmoProject everything was as it should be. Could the new versions be out in the wild already and impacting the supenodes?

I won't be on the beta except the few times I use a PC since I use the Mac and the Mylo more for Skyping. But after yesterday's audio issues with Skype when recording with Ken, I may have to wait for the real 3.0 to come out....because 1.5 and 2.0 just didn't work as well anymore...hmmm....