Eat one's own dog food
Encyclopedia
Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is when a company (usually, a software company) uses the products that it makes. In 1988, Microsoft manager Paul Maritz
Paul Maritz
Paul Maritz is CEO of VMware Corporation , and a past senior executive at Microsoft.Born and raised in Rhodesia , his family later moved to South Africa where he was schooled at Highbury Preparatory School and Hilton College. He received a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Natal,...

 sent Brian Valentine
Brian Valentine
H. Brian Valentine is the Senior Vice President, Ecommerce Platform at Amazon.com. Previously he was a senior vice president of the Windows Core Operating System Division at Microsoft where he was responsible for overseeing the development of core Windows technologies such as networking and the...

, 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 the company. Dogfooding can be a way for a company to demonstrate confidence in its own products, and hence a kind of testimonial advertising. For example, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 and Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

 emphasize the internal use of their own software products.
The idea behind "eating your own dog food" is that if you expect customers to buy your products, you should also be willing to use them. InfoWorld
InfoWorld
InfoWorld is an information technology online media and events business operating under the umbrella of InfoWorld Media Group, a division of IDG...

commented that this needs to be transparent and honest: "watered-down examples, such as auto dealers' policy of making salespeople drive the brands they sell, or Coca-Cola allowing no Pepsi products in corporate offices ... are irrelevant." The risks of public failure when using a company's own products may explain the limited amount of public dogfooding. A perceived advantage beyond marketing is that it should allow employees to test the products in real, complex scenarios, and it gives management pre-launch a sense of progress as the product is being used in practice.

Examples

Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...

 president Michael Scott in 1980 wrote a memo announcing that "EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!! NO MORE TYPEWRITERS ARE TO BE PURCHASED, LEASED, etc., etc." by the computer company, with a goal to eliminate typewriters by 1 January 1981.

The development of Windows NT
Windows NT
Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix. It was intended to complement...

 at Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 involved over 200 developers in small teams, and it was held together by Dave Cutler
Dave Cutler
David Neil Cutler, Sr. is an American software engineer, designer and developer of several operating systems including RSX-11M, VMS and VAXELN at Digital Equipment Corporation and Windows at Microsoft.- Personal history :...

's insistence in February 1991 on dogfooding, developing the operating system on computers running on NT using a daily build, initially text only, then with graphics, and finally with networking. It was initially crash prone, but the immediate feedback of code breaking the build, the loss of pride, and the knowledge of impeding the work of others were all powerful incentives. Infoworld
InfoWorld
InfoWorld is an information technology online media and events business operating under the umbrella of InfoWorld Media Group, a division of IDG...

reported in 2005 that a tour of Microsoft's Network operations center
Network Operations Center
A network operations center is one or more locations from which control is exercised over a computer, television broadcast, or telecommunications network....

 "showed pretty much beyond a reasonable doubt that Microsoft does run its 20,000-plus node, international network on 99 percent Windows technology, including servers, workstations, and edge security." InfoWorld argued that "Microsoft's use of Windows for its high-traffic operations tipped many doubters over to Windows' side of the fence," though John C. Dvorak
John C. Dvorak
John C. Dvorak is an American columnist and broadcaster in the areas of technology and computing. His writing extends back to the 1980s, when he was a mainstay of a variety of magazines. Dvorak is also the Vice-President of Mevio and well known for his work for Tech TV...

 writing in PC Magazine
PC Magazine
PC Magazine is a computer magazine published by Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009...

about Microsoft's dogfooding complained that "I'm still baffled by some of the long-term annoyances we suffer with Windows."
In the mid-1990s, Microsoft's internal email system was initially developed around Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

. When asked why, they publicly moved to using Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Exchange can refer to:* Microsoft Exchange Server, an email server software product from Microsoft* Microsoft Exchange Client, the former companion client software for Exchange Server that was embedded into some versions of Microsoft Windows...

. In 2000, they advertised vacancies for Unix administrators for a Microsoft-run web hosting service.

In 1999, Hewlett-Packard staff referred to a project using HP's own products as "Project Alpo".

When Time Warner
Time Warner
Time Warner is one of the world's largest media companies, headquartered in the Time Warner Center in New York City. Formerly two separate companies, Warner Communications, Inc...

 merged with AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...

 in 2001, AOL's email system was adopted by the new AOL Time Warner, resulting in lost emails and productivity. Use of the system was discontinued.

Government green public procurement that allows testing of proposed environmental policies has been compared to dogfooding.

On June 1, 2011, YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

 added a license feature to its video uploading service allowing users to choose between a standard or Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...

 license. The license label was followed by the message (Shh! - Internal Dogfood) that appeared on all YouTube videos lacking commercial licensing. A YouTube employee confirmed that this referred to products that are tested internally.

Origin

The editor of IEEE Software
IEEE Software
IEEE Software is a broad-based practitioner-oriented magazine of IEEE Computer Society targeting software professionals, including business analysts, requirements engineers, designers, architects, developers, process improvement experts, testers, quality engineers, and project managers...

recounts that in the 1980s television advertisements for Alpo dog food
Alpo (pet food)
Alpo is an American brand of dog food marketed and manufactured by the Nestlé Purina Petcare subsidiary of Nestlé. The brand is offered as a canned or packaged soft food, as well as in dry kibbles.-History:...

, Lorne Greene
Lorne Greene
Lorne Greene , was the stage name of Lyon Himan Green, OC, a Canadian actor.His television roles include Ben Cartwright on the western Bonanza, and Commander Adama in the science fiction movie and subsequent TV Series Battlestar Galactica...

 pointed out that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Another possible origin is the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders' meetings.

Criticism and alternatives

Forcing those who design products to actually use and rely on them is often thought to improve quality and usability
Usability
Usability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object. The object of use can be a software application, website, book, tool, machine, process, or anything a human interacts with. A usability study may be conducted as a primary job function by a usability analyst or as a secondary job...

, but software developers may be blind to usability and may have knowledge to make software work that an end user will lack. Microsoft's chief information officer
Chief information officer
Chief information officer , or information technology director, is a job title commonly given to the most senior executive in an enterprise responsible for the information technology and computer systems that support enterprise goals...

 noted in 2008 that, previously, "We tended not to go through the actual customer experience. We were always upgrading from a beta, not from production disk to production disk." Dogfooding may happen too early to be viable, and those forced to use the products may assume that someone else has reported the problem or they may get used to applying workarounds. Dogfooding may be unrealistic, as customers will always have a choice of different company's products to use together, and the product may not be being used as intended. The process can lead to a loss of productivity and demoralisation, or at its extreme to "Not Invented Here
Not Invented Here
Not invented here is a term used to describe persistent social, corporate, or institutional culture that avoids using or buying already existing products, research, standards, or knowledge because of their external origins. It is normally used in a pejorative sense, and may be considered an...

 syndrome"; i.e., only using internal products.

In 2007, the CIO of Pegasystems
Pegasystems
Pegasystems Inc. is a provider of Business Process Management software solutions and a Business rules Platform based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.-History:Pegasystems was founded in 1983 by Alan Trefler...

 said that she uses the alternate phrase "drinking our own champagne". Novell's head of public relations
Public relations
Public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc....

 Bruce Lowry, commenting on his company's use of Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 and OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org, commonly known as OOo or OpenOffice, is an open-source application suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. OpenOffice is available for a number of different computer operating systems, is distributed as free software...

, said that he also prefers this phrase. In 2009, the new CIO of Microsoft, Tony Scott, argued that the phrase "dogfooding" was unappealing and should be replaced by "icecreaming", with the aim of developing products as "ice cream that our customers want to consume."

External links

  • What Is The Work Of Dogs In This Country? (Joel Spolsky
    Joel Spolsky
    Avram Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a blog on software development. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994. He later founded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and launched the Joel on Software blog...

     on Fogbugz's dogfooding, Joel On Software, 5 May 2001)
  • 'Chowing down on dogfood' - (Google dogfooding Blogger
    Blogger (service)
    Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. Up until May 1, 2010 Blogger allowed users to publish...

    )
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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