Greatest Marketing/PR Success of 2006

Beta.

Beta is still defined in the dictionary as

preliminary or testing stage of a software or hardware product; “a beta version”; “beta software”

which implies “buggy“. I know something is wrong with the world whenever I find myself agreeing with a mac blogger.

Indeed it seems that to the general public “beta” now means “new & cool”. The World+Dog is now labeling their released software and even normal web pages (i.e. not web2.0/AJAXy) as beta to try and get some of the word’s “cool factor” that makes users willing to put up with bugs, lack of functionality. Even actually decent, not-so-buggy release-worthy software/web pages are being labeled “beta” just because people think it’s cool. Amazing.

Runner Up: The Nintendo Wii
Though not as amazing as changing the de facto meaning of a word, Nintendo as managed to do something pretty awesome: sell people overpriced  budget hardware and have people praise and even thank them for it. Granted, Apple did that for a long time (until the switch to Intel – some would argue it still does) but it did so by pretending its hardware was good and worthy of a premium fee. Nintendo is openly selling hardware everyone knows sucks.

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Related posts:

1. My Future Netbook Or Something
2. NPR and WSJ building ‘Flash-free’ pages for iPad
3. GLP 2006 – Day 0 or something