Software version number silliness

Some bad ideas never seem to die. For instance; hiding or obscuring the version number so that customers won't know some information about the product. It's usually driven by some naive belief held by product management or marketing. Here's a case where they got together.

I got a giggle out of this quote from the email thread:

We can't be at all accessible to the client, we'll just have to find another way.

The reason is simple: when they see "Version 2.8 (build 448)," they will think that it took us 28 releases and over *four hundred* builds to get right.

Every time I run across one of these stories I think back to my own experience with Norton Utilities for Macintosh (known to many as NUM). For version 1.0, we had several point releases (including one major recompile with a Think C patch to make it work on the new 68040 Quadras) for which we used version numbers using a normal 'vers' resource. On NUM 2.0, we had six or seven point releases and were never allowed to change the version number. Every release was set to April 22, 1992 at 2:0x PM.

As I recall, sales had the final say on it. They were afraid that we'd need to flush the channel (that was their term!) if word got out that we'd had an update. This was in the days before online updaters but it was still annoying because I wound up with the job of updating our build process to stick the 'official' version resources into pieces that were already built and had proper version data. The compromise made to keep everyones sanity (not quite everyone; just developers, QA and support) was to tinker with the time. The version 2.0 gold masters were set to 2:00 PM. Version 2.0.1 was set to 2:01 PM (I don't remember if we changed both times?), and so forth.

Along the way to version 3, we'd finally convinced the powers that be to pay for norton.com (a 48 KB/s dedicated link from Netcom to the Symantec offices in Cupertino that was backhauled to Santa Monica using the inter-office T1). That rather quickly evolved in an official online presence for Symantec. The anachronism that was norton.com eventually went away as the last identifiable bits of Peter Norton Computing were absorbed. But for a while, everyone who desired one could have a shell account and unfettered access to a version of the Internet which only existed for a short while. You'd hardly recognize it today. It was small enough to still be pretty well organized.

The online presence of companies with utility products grew incredibly quickly. Support forums on AOL and CI$ (maybe GEnie, I'm not sure) and a set of Norton USENET groups saw amazing traffic growth. Geeks were flooding online and changing a lot of business requirements as they became more obviously noisy. The business quickly began requiring updaters and a new company came along to help with the Mac update problem.

Internal problems were quickly quashed with an admonishment to go explain it to the customers and press who were demanding updates. The fight then escalated into who to tell (and how and when) should a new update occur. It likely continues to this day.