I wonder whose head will role here ?????
First of all it's spelled: R-O-L-L haha.. too much coffee this morning, not enough sleep??!? 
OK, secondly someone made a mistake, not like that woman working @ 911 they burned at the stake for sending the ambulance to the wrong address and it caused someone to die.. Whoever is at fault, I am sure it was a group effort. I am also sure that maybe someone will pay for this with their job, but I for one would be the FIRST to stand behind them and say "OK, you really put your foot in it this time, but hold your head up and just use this as a learning experience. Everything is going to be fine".
Whoever has NEVER committed a serious error in judgement or has never made a mistake in their lifetime, say "I". If anyone reponds that they have never made a mistake.. is LYING!
We ALL make mistakes, the degree to which results play out depends on how bad it was, but we are certainly ALL capable of doing wrong, and I am sure MANY of us have committed MANY mistakes. It's all part of learning, and we should NOT be quick to condemn.
"There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves ANY of us to find fault with the rest of us"
All beta's have expiration code in them, that is standard practice. it is too stop nefarious people running Beta code past the sell by date (ie GA) and to make sure that GA code is used, GA code is usually faster as it does not have all the de-bugging code running in it.
As you say it is standard practice to put a "kill date" in a beta, there's one very important reason you missed.
with such a date in your beta code, you know "for sure" that after a certain date no more people are going to call you with the beta running, this is important for support as they can then focus on the GA release just like it should. As VMware I would deem that even more important as stopping piracy, as support for beta's has a direct cost, while piracy doesn't (not that I approve software piracy at all)
--
Wil
Personally I am impressed with the letter. Being fairly new to the whole VMware world, I am glad to hear someone admit mistakes, and take action to fix it. I worked half a dozen years in the support department for one of the primary backup software companies, and too often code was rushed out the door when it wasn't ready, and there was no response from management, when backups were lost, unable to be restored or cause major issues. Developers make mistakes, sometimes it was their fault other time QA people didn't have the time do really do a good job before being told, "well, it's been released now anyway" I definately saw a major version be released that was nowhere ready (sort of reminds me of vista :smileygrin:).
