Things changed with the advent of the internet, of course. As soon as we had dial-up connections, developers could offer small patches to fix issues that were found after shipping. And once broadband connections were ubiquitously available, larger and more frequent patches were possible. At first, these resulted in new features being added on-the-fly, but it quickly evolved into issuing more and more substantial patches — until today, where most v1.0s are mere sketches of a future product.
Let’s turn this around. Imagine buying a copy of Roxio Toast back in 2000. You install it on your Mac after taking the CD out of the big plastic box that cost $49 at CompUSA and launch it. You insert a DVR-RW and are met with a pop-up that says “version 1.0 wast just a mere sketch of our future product. You can only burn DVD-R disks at this time. Please mail us a $5 check + shipping and handling to get this functionality when we finish it in 6 months”
BS. You ship a 1.0 product that is feature complete. You fix bugs as they come up, bugs that you never encountered in your internal testing then you work on version 2.0 features and in 12-18 months, you ship a paid upgrade. I’m not using a product that is a sketch of the future product.