I don't know if that's 100% true cause I've never had an issue with the release version of lightroom and I've run 1 and 2 on every machine imaginable.
I think Adobe is smart putting new versions of lightroom as a free beta. Then the people who want to play with it can and give feedback, so when the customer finally plops down their money, it's pretty much bug free.
That's the Adobe way, then the Phase way is to put it out, charge a fee and wait for customer feedback (beta test).
As gwtif says, Phase needs to go at least one year without receiving the Larry David Award.
I'm glad you had zero problems with LR but that's not representative of the entire user-base of LightRoom. LightRoom has had many bugs (especially in v1.0 and early in v2 - as you would expect); there was even a pretty bad bug in a release which had to be rolled back and reissued. Don't get me wrong, overall it's been very stable, but your lack of problems doesn't mean that there weren't plenty of them. As one very small example many medium format DNG files were rendered with hot-pink highlights for several version in a row during the v1 days..
That said Adobe is by far the best company I've experienced when it comes to minimal numbers of bugs. I can count on one hand the number of times Photoshop has crashed on me this year. However, Apple, Microsoft and everyone else in the software world regularly releases (paid and often very expensive) software packages with glaring omissions and very bad bugs.
Overall I've been very pleased by the relatively small number of bugs in version 5.0.
I think Adobe is smart putting new versions of lightroom as a free beta. Then the people who want to play with it can and give feedback, so when the customer finally plops down their money, it's pretty much bug free.
That's the Adobe way, then the Phase way is to put it out, charge a fee and wait for customer feedback (beta test).
There were a relatively large number of users invited to be beta testers of Capture One 5 which had five beta releases.
Moreover any user can download a 30-day fully-functional free trial of Capture One 5 (as there has been on every version of Capture One). If you purchase anything which has a fully functional free trial which requires LESS effort... well, in any case any user is welcome to download and make sure it suits his/her needs before plopping down the cash for it. If it helps I'm sure we can get one of the famous "stickers" and place the word "beta" on your monitor next to the download for the free trial.
Doug Peterson
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Head of Technical Services, Capture Integration
Phase One, Leaf, Leica, Canon, Apple, Profoto, Eizo & More
National: 877.217.9870 | Cell: 740.707.2183
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