It was commerce in the old (late 20th century) days too, but releasing on tape/disk had its advantages:
We shipped every year, or maybe every 6 months. What this meant in practice is that every team got their features to "shoddy" state, but one team would always take much longer to get there than the others, and because we were in a "feature freeze" near ship dates, the teams who were waiting for integration could use that time to clean up their features, applying craftsmanship to make things "shipshape"; products could ship with one or two wobbly new features, and most of them pretty solid.
Now, with internet updates, as soon as a team gets to "shoddy", the feature ships; no one polishes; and all new features tend towards wobbly. (for the business this is an advantage, as features are stabilised only in response to demonstrated customer demand, but I think the enforced opportunities for cleanup on the old schedule, however disadvantageous for the business, were advantageous for engineering, as well as those customers who hadn't explicitly signed up for the beta program)
On the other hand, that also meant that if the team/company didn't give a toss about the quality they'd release the product unfinished, and there'd be no way to improve it even if someone wanted to. So while in some cases you'd have time to polish things up, in a lot of cases you still had the "eh, it's good enough, ship it" attitude without the benefit of being able to fix anything later.
We shipped every year, or maybe every 6 months. What this meant in practice is that every team got their features to "shoddy" state, but one team would always take much longer to get there than the others, and because we were in a "feature freeze" near ship dates, the teams who were waiting for integration could use that time to clean up their features, applying craftsmanship to make things "shipshape"; products could ship with one or two wobbly new features, and most of them pretty solid.
Now, with internet updates, as soon as a team gets to "shoddy", the feature ships; no one polishes; and all new features tend towards wobbly. (for the business this is an advantage, as features are stabilised only in response to demonstrated customer demand, but I think the enforced opportunities for cleanup on the old schedule, however disadvantageous for the business, were advantageous for engineering, as well as those customers who hadn't explicitly signed up for the beta program)