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In particular, working on games, I believe (like with films), I don't think "release early, release often" is a good idea.
It might work with massive multiplayer games, where users tend to keep re-exploring the same content, but in general with games once someone has played a game once they don't tend to want to play it again.
I tried "release early, release often" with an iPhone game I wrote, and it was a mistake. The biggest problem is that users get angry if you take away, or significantly change, content from users. That's reasonable, but it means once you have added a level it is hard to take it away, even if you have a new, better level to replace it with.
Although, as a counterpoint "release early, release often" works well for Minecraft.
The iPhone does make this difficult, as a release usually takes one week to go through Apple's approval system. Therefore you can't make mistake today and fix it tomorrow.
This is what the Android market is good for. However the stores are different, so lessons learned on the Market may not suit your iPhone audience.
Blizzard have always followed this philosophy with their game balance changes: they make very small changes each patch. They are so careful that often, the effect they are trying to achieve won't be hit until after several patches. See, for example, druid effectiveness in Player-versus-Player: it's steadily, but very slowly, decreased since The Burning Crusade, as a result of druids being (perceived?) too good at surviving.
I mostly kept my Android game's existing content the same. The only changes I made were to slightly decrease difficulty each patch, as some areas were definitely too hard (the first boss could take up to 10 tries to kill, no matter what you did :).
One thing that users really love though is the release of a large chunk of content in one patch - e.g. a brand new area to explore. I don't think this translates well to websites or webapps - no matter how much of a killer 'feature', users can be very cynical or underwhelmed.
Finally, in enterprise software development, you need to be very careful with rapid release cycles as corporations are very dependent on the stability of your product, even if it's internal.
Horses for courses. The bottom line is to use the best strategy for the job.
If there's an inverse correlation between the speed of deployment and the quality of your software, you're doing it wrong.
The Continuous Delivery philosophy is borrowed from Lean Manufacturing, and a fundamental tenet of that movement is "Build Quality In." In fact Lean is nearly synonymous with TQM, or Total Quality Management. If you've separated the two, then you've missed the entire point.
This tenet is carried over into the software world by Martin Fowler in his book Continuous Delivery, as well as all of the major advocates of lean software processes, for instance David Anderson and the Poppendiecks in their highly influential series of books on Lean Software.
Essential to a successful continuous deployment process is unit testing, continuous integration and built-in testing processes all along the way to feature deployment. These should be focused on quality all along the way: that's the point of continuous deployment, to allow for focused feature development that is highly tested and can be released with higher confidence than the old method of multiple feature release, which are heavy, harder to test and have more integration concerns.
The point of fast releases should never be to allow for "shitty software," but rather to deliver features that users can enjoy as soon as possible, create a process where deployments become highly automated, low-risk events, and gather feedback early and often on the experience of users with finished polished features so that effective product evaluation is happening constantly and the company can adapt quicker to new data and new trends.
A quick perusal of even the first chapter of any of the major volumes on Continuous Delivery should clear this up:
http://martinfowler.com/snips/201006021426.html http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Software-Development-Agile-Toolki...
http://www.amazon.com/Implementing-Lean-Software-Development...
And there's a fantastic presentation by David Anderson on Kanban on InfoQ, which nicely illustrates why quality is one of the major reasons you should consider a rapid release process like Kanban:
http://scottchacon.com/2011/08/31/github-flow.html
Where I work at LivingSocial the web application is deployed daily, sometimes dozens of times a day. I've recently taken over the Android project's infrastructure and we're in the process of implementing Continuous Delivery for that app as well.
David Anderson gives examples of implementing it at both Microsoft and Corbis, Bill Gates' other software company.
"Martin Fowler" is on the cover in two different places, plus it looks just like the cover of Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, which he did write, so I've had that misconception in my brain for a while. Failure to test assumptions...
What does the constant barrage of (for example) iTunes or Flash updates do to the user's perception of quality?
What is the impact of the Chrome release cycle on a corporate environment that needs to test each revision on a model office, in case there's an impact on one business-critical application or other?
User expectations are different for mobile apps -- anecdotally it seems users not as annoyed by mobile app updates as they would be for Flash or even Word, because the process is a lot lighter and less painful. For web applications it's transparent to the end user.
But, yes for rich client apps it's a concern. I think the trick is to deliver features rather than bug fixes and shape user expectations towards getting something new from an update rather than getting nothing but fixes that should have been in place to begin with.
Identically, the Polished Release example also describes a situation of releasing a product that does not have all the features of its competitors: The first version of iOS "(then called as iPhone OS), did not even have MMS"
Seems like the author didn't pick a great example to demonstrate a Polished Release.
[1]> Every single release of a movie, whether it is The Jurassic Park and its sequels or The Matrix and its sequels or Steve Jobs’s own Toy Story and its sequels never had "versions".
Sometimes, however, things are so new that the only way to get to the good result fast (or, to get to the good result at all) you need to release early, release often. Lotus 1-2-3 was such a huge improvement over paper sheets and such a new idea that it totally warranted "release early, release often" mantra.