Norman linked to Top Twelve Tips for Running a Beta Test in another thread. While reading it, I came across:
Open betas don’t work. You either get too many testers (think Netscape) in which case you can’t get good data from the testers, or too few reports from the existing testers.
Now, pretend I am too young to have participated.
What happened in the Netscape beta?
Was it an interesting story?
Netscape basically did what google does with things like Mail etc
They threw it wide open to EVERY person on the planet and called it “beta”
They were so inundated with bug reports & feature requests that it wasn’t possible to triage anything or prioritize anything
At least thats MY recollection of it
Netscape had two good products, a good web server and a well-known browser as client. During the browser wars in the 90ies Netscape found it self in a position with less performance and features than the Internet Explorer by Microsoft. So they decided to broaden the user base and secondly the developing process. But this already was too late and half-baked. After seeing all the technical debts, restrictions by closed source 3rd party components and other obstacles, the community decided to rewrite the complete browser - and Mozilla Firefox was born out of the former Netscape.