Does any beta survive first contact with users?

Probably not, although in the sense that's the whole point of the exercise. This was my first experience with running a beta for a product. I started my professional life in technology on the IT side of the business. It's interesting how the objectives of a product’s beta and release candidate phases are the same as an IT solutions user acceptance testing, pilot, and parallel phases - to get the product/solution ready for use. But with an IT solution, your customer has already purchased the item, in many cases your users are contractually obligated to test, and there are often very large gaps between the objectives of your customer (the executive with the checkbook), and the needs and desires of your users (the people actually interacting with the software). For a product those conditions and distinctions simply aren't true.

The first beta of QuickSwitch is now over. We got some really good feedback, but unfortunately a number of users were unable to even try the beta because of installation problems. The second beta of QuickSwitch, the speech based interface for window management, will be starting today. If you are a user of Dragon NaturallySpeaking you can still sign up. In addition to fixing installation issues, we've cleaned up a whole host of presentation and reliability issues as well as added a new feature - in addition to switching tasks based on a menu preview, you can now switch directly based on the index of your task in the taskbar. We'll get some videos up shortly to demonstrate these two features.

This phase is limited to the functionality in QuickSwitch Basic. The window placement, windows sizing, and mouse control functionality will be available in a separate edition  - QuickSwitch Complete.