For planning software releases, I take inspiration from Chrome, Ubuntu, and Microsoft. They all have different release cycles, it's interesting to compare them.
Chrome: agile, 12 weekly releases, subtle upgrades, parallel versions with different stability levels.
Ubuntu: fixed six monthly schedule, well advertised schedule (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=107E4RXNxYc) means difficult for them not to release on time, it's a selling point. Every 24 months long term support release.
Microsoft: major products released approximately every three years. Heavy marketing efforts around releases rather than features. Service pack releases and patches released on an ongoing basis.
I guess Chrome has less of an enterprise install base, which means they are more able to release on an ongoing basis. Enterprise IT teams like to install known good releases and not let other the vendors manage the upgrades.
Indeed. Microsoft charges for their major version updates. I'm sure this is a reason why people have put excessive importance in Chrome's major version number. When you release for free you can choose version numbers for engineering reasons, when your revenue is tied to releases you ensure that each major version bump is sufficiently "meaty" to justify the purchase.
http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_s...
They do this even for fundamental features of the browser. For example, there's four different process models available:
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process-...
For planning software releases, I take inspiration from Chrome, Ubuntu, and Microsoft. They all have different release cycles, it's interesting to compare them.
Chrome: agile, 12 weekly releases, subtle upgrades, parallel versions with different stability levels.
Ubuntu: fixed six monthly schedule, well advertised schedule (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=107E4RXNxYc) means difficult for them not to release on time, it's a selling point. Every 24 months long term support release.
Microsoft: major products released approximately every three years. Heavy marketing efforts around releases rather than features. Service pack releases and patches released on an ongoing basis.
I guess Chrome has less of an enterprise install base, which means they are more able to release on an ongoing basis. Enterprise IT teams like to install known good releases and not let other the vendors manage the upgrades.