Eating one's own dog food
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Eating one's own dog food, also called dogfooding, means that a company uses the products that it makes. Dogfooding can be a way for a company to demonstrate confidence in its own products, and hence a kind of testimonial advertising.[1]For example, Microsoft emphasizes the use of its own software products inside the company.
The idea may have originated from testimonial-type television advertisements for Alpo brand dog food;[citation needed] in which the actor Lorne Greene claimed he fed it to his own dogs. In 1988, Microsoft manager Paul Maritz sent Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled "Eating our own Dogfood" challenging him to increase internal usage of the company's product. From there, the usage of the term spread through Microsoft, as chronicled in the book Inside Out: Microsoft—In Our Own Words (ISBN 0446527394).
In many development environments, to "eat one's own dog food" refers to a point at which a product under development is delivered, even in its rough state, to all project members for use. Particularly in software development, early versions of the product may contain many bugs, crash, lose data or otherwise be unusable, and the people on the project team do not fully rely on it. As the product matures, members of the team may be reluctant to try it, as they are aware of problems with earlier versions.[citation needed]
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- What Is The Work Of Dogs In This Country? (Joel Spolsky, Joel On Software, 05 May 2001)
- Dogfooding and Microsoft
- Chowing down on dogfood
