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How Can We Reflect Our Productions Evolution In Their Names?
We have a well established products line (more than 25 years) with roughly once a year major release per product. We've traditionally named these products with the version number following the name such as MyProduct 6.3 which is a fairly common practice in the software industry. We are now getting to a point where these version/build numbers doesn’t really reflect our development efforts because the rate of change of these versions keeps decreasing over time. So we thought about breaking with the tradition and use a year number for each major release like Microsoft does such as MyProduct 2008 (who cares that Office 2007 is actually Office 12.x or SQL 2008 is SQL 10.x?) but this could lead us into another set of issues. So are there others naming schemas out there? How can we reflect our productions’ evolution in their names?
I have seen four themes for naming releases:
- name (or model number without any version numbers)(salesforce, Linksys WRT54GL)
- name + year (Office 2007, iLife 08)
- name + version number (iTunes 7.3)
- name + release theme (remember OS/2 Warp?)
Hosted services tend to have no visible version number although there is always a version number somewhere for tech support purposes.
Obviously, Microsoft has gone with the year method and there's something great about that: You know that you're really out of date if you're running Office 2000. The negative is if the vendor hasn't delivered anything since 2000. I wrote about the relative merits of the last method in http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/publications/topics/03/0301sj
In the end, I think the naming standard depends on what you're trying to accomplish. A major release usually means that you charge the customer for it. I actually am annoyed when I'm charged for a minor release. I just upgraded from a product's 7.1 to 7.3 and had to pay $75. I'd be more willing to pay to go from 7.x to 8.x--which is the most common situation. But at version 12 and 13, this starts to get a little ridiculous. Version numbers become less relevant as the product reaches maturity.
I suspect that your customers do not care except as the name or version relates to billing.
Answered By Steve Johnson
