Overheard: Enterprise-level beta testing not easy

“From that day forward we said we will not ship a product that we sell to the enterprise until we run our business on it” Ron Markezich, Microsoft’s ultimate beta tester

That issue came to a head with the release of Exchange Server 2000. Markezich says the product was not running optimally inside Microsoft, but it was shipped to customers nonetheless. The result was a veritable nightmare: customers experienced the same problems and Microsoft had to rush out numerous hotfixes.