On August 4th, Greg Reinacker – NewsGator founder and CTO – announced NewsGator Enterprise Server and stated that it would ship in Q3. On Friday night, September 30, at 7:28pm (Mountain Time) Greg sent out an email stating “FYI – build 3202 was declared “gold” at 7:13pm tonight.”
In my first company, we had an enormous amount of scrutiny on releases as we shipped them all the time. Since we wrote custom software, we often updated our customers’ systems and – as a result – were releasing software for clients as frequently as daily (although typically we tried to stay on an approximately once a month cycle.) Since we usually had more than 20 active clients at a time, we could have a half a dozen releases in any given week.
For a while, we’d say things like “we’ll release it on Tuesday.” We eventually figured out that this meant (at least to the person working on the software) “I can work on this up until 11:59:59pm on Tuesday, at which point the client will be asleep anyway, so I can let it slip until Wednesday morning and finish it up then early before the client gets to work.” You can imagine what this devolved into.
We eventually started specifying date / time pairs for releases – it was ok to release something on 9/30 @ 11:59pm (or 9/30 @ 12:01pm). 9/31 @ 12:01am didn’t work, although I’m sure someone tried.
So – 9/30 @ 7:28pm counts for Q3. Congrats NewsGator.