Talk:Eating your own dog food

message: Read allegation it was FM foods, and sales reps trying to get grocery stores to carry pet-food.  Since pets got table scraps, and selling pet food was an innovation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.110.171.226 (talk) 23:03, 26 April 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I had heard that the phrase originated at Kal Kan pet food company.  Each year the president would eat a can of dog food in front of the entire company to show the quality of the dog food and that in fact, he could eat his own dog food.  SAL - 2005-12-22 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.138.150.249 (talk) 16:35, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Which dog-food company? 

message: Are you sure that Microsoft eats its own dogfood? I was under the impression (from the Jargon File) that the whole point was that Microsoft doesn't eat its own dogfood - hence the general opinion that its software is awful. Hence the negative connotations about not eating one's own dogfood: the bugs don't get fixed because the author's don't know what's wrong.
Anyway, could somebody please clarify this matter? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Qscomputing (talk • contribs) 08:57, 24 June 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Dave Cutler practiced it and used the term, according to Pascal Zachary's 1994 Showstopper! the Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation. He was a pretty aggressive team leader with a short temper (at the time, anyways). "Dogfooding" is rather aggressive term. When would forcing your staff to "eat their own dogfood" be anything else??? (Note that I "cut the line" in this thread because the answers in the rest of the conversation are clueless. It really doesn't matter if Microsoft utilized the practice afterwards or not. It was done with Windows NT from its' inception. It has ever since been associated with Microsoft.)Cuvtixo (talk) 05:29, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

text: the jargon file?  that's authoritive.  I was under the impression that MSFT was the origination of the term.  Not only does MSFT eat dogfood within its product groups but it gives dogfood builds to other product groups to encourage them to use it.  Even critical corporate infrastructure gets put on major dogfood server builds of Windows, Exchange, SQL, etc. SchmuckyTheCat 14:28, 24 June 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Some groups at Microsoft definitely eat their own dogfood, although it's possible they didn't when the Jargon file was first written.  See  and  for recent discussion of dogfood as far back as Windows 95 development.  It's also not likely a company-wide requirement.  It's hard to eat your own dogfood when you write video games, for instance.  -- Plutor 17:03, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: According to rumors, Microsoft is not using their Visual SourceSafe source control program internally (for a good reason too, it's outdated and buggy). In any case, I am not sure why we would want to use a specific company here, without even providing any details; does Microsoft need promotion or something? Cema 17:15, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Uh, because Microsoft is probably the largest proponent of the saying?  And yes, SourceSafe is used within the company for projects of the size it is meant to work with. SchmuckyTheCat 17:20, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

text: Did Microsfot ever get Hotmail coverted over to any Windows platform? I seem to recall it got to be a big deal 2 or 3 years after buying them that that they were still running some flavor of Unix (not Microsoft's Xenix). Ewlyahoocom 14:06, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Microsoft 

message: I have just reordered the page, and found that it contains 2 (mutually exclusive) indication of origin for the sentence Eat one's own dog food. Does anyone has any source indicating which one is most likely to be correct? Schutz 00:38, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: An act of "eating one's own dog food" was illustrated in a scene in the 1939 P.G. Wodehouse story The Go-getter, in which a character acting as representative of a particular brand of dog food eats a dog biscuits in order to demonstrate its wholesomeness. I'm adding it - if anyone has objections please let me know.--Philologia (talk) 03:25, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Nice find.  That's much more consistent with the first explanation I ever heard of the term.  I'm also concerned that the page conflates "eating your own dog food" with "dogfooding."  I assume dogfooding is an evolution of "eating your own dog food", but, as commonly used they've grown quite different.  "Eating your own dog food" means using your own products to run your business.  "Dogfooding" refers to a final testing phase just before a product release.Aidtopia (talk) 21:31, 22 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origins 

message: This whole page seems much too highly focused on computers and the software industry.  While dot-com businessmen may have helped popularize the phrase in recent years, it's already noted in the page that it was likely in use long before most people knew what a comupter was.
Moreover, the concept is a common principle that is applicable to almost any business.  I, for one, was surprised not to see a mention or cross reference to Sy Sperling of the Hair Club For Men and his unavoidable TV sales pitch:  "I'm not only the President, I'm also a client".  (I'd add it myself, but given the page's current geek-centric nature, I can't seem to find a place where it fits.)  I'm sure there are many other examples of the principle in action outside the technology field that could be listed here as well. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.126.122.4 (talk) 23:45, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank  you, excellent points. Moreover, inasmuch as the word has caught on in the tech world, the meaning has evolved. It is used (and by Maritz and people who worked for him at Microsoft) to mean something more like "internal beta release". A version that is considered good enough to start using by end users (or even just by the developers, but used not for testing but for its intended purpose) is called a "dogfood release" and emails get sent out that say "it's dogfood, please start using it". This is a different meaning than the original as it does not imply the product is even marketed yet. 68.174.97.122 (talk) 19:56, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too much geek 

message: I heard this phrase used often while I was a computer science grad student at a major university. This was before blogs even existed. Take it to AFD if you want, and the article certainly could use improvement and better citations, but it's a notable phrase/concept. Let's improve the article instead of deleting it. I removed the PROD tag. SparsityProblem 21:23, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I entered university in 1988 when my school did computer science with VAX machines that students could access through 'dumb terminals'. 3.5 inch "floppies" were a big new deal, replacing the 5.25 ones. I used an Apple IIe for all my papers. I have no idea where tech was when you were in grad school. Before blogs existed? I had one professor touting the greatness of email at my school, trying to get other people to use it. One. I took a class in Banyan Vines Networks in '94, and my teachers were telling me that TCP/IP was soon going to be replaced by much better protocols. Zachary G. Pascal came out with Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft that year, where he describes Dave Cutler as utilizing the practice and using the phrase. Now, this might sound like bragging about how old I am, but take another look at "while I was a computer grad student at a major university... before blogs even existed." This could be any university before 2000. I don't believe anyone actually preserved this article with that kind of claim! It's as bad as the claim that it's a blogger neologism. At least that person knew what a fancy word like neologism means! Cuvtixo (talk) 05:59, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not a blogger neologism 

message: The dispute seems to be over tech vs. non-tech usage.
# There's lots of non-tech content here
# There's no evident history of disputes over tech/non-tech content
# The term probably sees genuinely more usage in tech settings.
The article needs cleaning, but not a POV scrub. Can we change tags? I will if nobody vouches for the  tag. --- tqbf 22:18, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  No POV problem 

message: This appears to be simply defining a neologism that may be specifically used in Microsoft. The only three sources which are usable and appear to use the term as defined in the article are both microsoft sources. There is no evidence given to the origin of the term or anything else. In the interview where MS is asked about where it came from they make no mention of the commercial.--Crossmr (talk) 01:29, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Term

message: Well, I've come across the word "dogfood" used approximately as defined here but never for a Microsoft product. I suppose that the reason is that Microsoft products are closed-source, that anyone having access to the source is under strict non-disclosure contractual agreements, and that since I'm not a Microsoft employee I don't have access to their programmers' slang.
However, contrary to Microsoft, Mozilla products are open-source, and anyone can be a beta tester, or even an alpha tester, without even asking. That's where I've come across the term: in Mozilla's bug-tracking system, aptly named Bugzilla and used (as a software product) by many other software companies, there is (in Mozilla's own implementation for tracking bugs in its own products) a "keyword" named dogfood, and defined as follows: The keyword is used to mark a bug which prevents use of the product by Mozilla developers (breaks bugzilla, for example, or crashes on reading bugmail). If you are not a Mozilla developer, you should not set this keyword. If you don't know whether or not you're a Mozilla developer, you should not set this keyword. (from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describekeywords.cgi). Quite clearly, the keyword means (in Mozilla slang) that the bug makes the product "not dogfoodable", i.e., that with that bug, the product becomes useless for its own developers. This use explicitly excludes most of the beta testers (and possibly quite a lot of the alpha testers too), because, in the Mozilla world, most beta testers are people from "the world at large", who are willing to use test versions of the product with the knowledge that all bugs haven't yet been found, in order to get in exchange the luxury of using the latest enhancements and novelties before (and in some cases even years before) they are officially released. Most of these testers, I think (and certainly I) would be totally at a loss if they had to do any programming task anywhere in the source of any Mozilla product. —Tonymec (talk) 02:18, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Microsoft, really?

message: This reminds me that IPS (IP.Board creators) use their own Software that they wrote:
IP.Content is for their own website, and IP.Board if for the forum, 
Get the idea?
ECat200 (talk) 09:46, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  IPS, Inc 

message: People who work for ad companies and have ad-blockers installed, or those who wouldn't be seen dead using products made by the company they work for. Plenty of people that work in sausage-making places wouldn't eat one, knowing how they're made.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.174.211.145 (talk) 14:08, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  What about anti-dogfooding ? 

message: In the introductions, it says this, "Compare this to fictional cases where Google employees used Microsoft Outlook to execute the functional task of sending emails, or Microsoft employees writing documents with WordPerfect."
It should be noted that Gmail does allow for POP3, SMTP and IMAP, which means it's entirely relevent for Google to be using Microsoft Outlook, even if they're dogfooding their own product (although they may not be accessing every single feature of Gmail that way, but they won't be accessing all the features if they don't use POP3 and/or IMAP, too). 63.155.34.117 (talk) 04:30, 22 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Google and Microsoft Outlook 

message: I had heard once that this term was brought forth when there was a live-dog-food commercial where the dog actually rejected the food. I have found one here, from the Johnny Carson show. It is actually hilarious what Johnny does, after the dog is clearly not interested.
Johnny Carson Bloopers: Johnny Helps with the Alpo Dog Food Ad on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show
Macetw (talk) 20:05, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Live commercial: Alpo Dog Food Rejected 

message: Should it really be "Eating your own dog food", featuring a use of generic you? This article title seems slightly unencyclopedic to me. 142.162.190.34 (talk) 10:59, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Your"? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Dunno if they still do it, but in the leadup to Mozilla 1.0, Mozilla also used the term "catfood" for final polishing bugs as a variation on "dogfood", the idea being that cats are fussier. If I could find a good reference I'd add it to "other terms" - David Gerard (talk) 22:08, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mozilla and "catfood" 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Surely this should read "Dogs Dinner"  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.98.66.68 (talk) 10:26, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dogs breakfast 

message: The first time I read the phrase was in Pascal Zachary's Showstopper! the Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation which here is cited from 2009. That might have been the publication date of the ebook, but the original book was published in 1994, which makes a world of difference in the tech field. If there is a method of citing the exact page of the ebook, AND including the date of the original dead tree book and it's ISBN, please make this change. Apparently Dave Cutler was fond of the term (and the concept) and is quoted using it in the 1994 book. I suspect Cutler picked it up at Digital Equipment Corporation, and I think histories, biographies or published material about DEC would be a good place to start looking for its' origin in tech. Warren Harrison's recollections of 1970s television advertisements with Lorne Greene and Alpo dog food and the president of Kal Kan Pet Food are at least cited, but the IEEE editor's article is from 2006, over 10 years after Showstopper!'s publication and probably 30 or more years after Lorne Green's commercials. It's not a reliable recollection as an origin of the phrase, and the jump from 70's ads to 1990's computer programming is utterly unexplained. The examples in the Examples section are ridiculous because there's no reference to the term "dogfooding" in them! Although it became popular in the programming field (at least after Zachary's book); giving examples that do not include, and may predate the term, is bogus. You might as well cite medieval or Biblical references. I'm sure there are examples of it (perhaps religious leaders following their own scripture?) but it's nonsensical. Dave Cutler, according to Showstopper!, was a pretty aggressive team leader with a short temper. He in fact admitted utilizing his reputation as having a short temper to Pascal Zachary as a motivation tool when creating Windows NT. "Dogfooding" fits this image, as it is rather aggressive term. When would forcing your staff to "eat their own dogfood" be anything else???  Another example cited: "When Time Warner merged with AOL..." is an example of dogfooding NOT working, without any reference to the phrase.  If the author wants to write an analysis and put it in paragraph form under Criticism and alternative terms (uuhg! Note the lack of capitalization of "alternative terms" in the section header) or better yet create a separate "Criticism" section, please do. Otherwise it's unencyclopedic, a series of statements that might belong in Wiktionary or another dictionary, not an encyclopedia article. Note the mother of all English dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary takes great pains to find the very first use of a word in printed text. I almost wish the proposed for deletion by Nydas in 2007 went through, because this article just desecrates the concept of a Wikipedia article on one of my favorite subjects, personal computer history! Cuvtixo (talk) 05:38, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: FYI, the Wikipedia manual of style says that headings are only capitalised at the the first word. --Escape Orbit (Talk) 12:17, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disaster! This article has so many problems! I'm not sure where to start! 

message: nb this is a totally different concept with a very similar name:
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.7.3.342
John a s (talk) 14:29, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Eating Your Own Lunch