I ask because I swear A/B and multivariatate tests have been around my head a lot lately, and when I finished reading the article, the first thing I thought was: Why not just deploy to 1% of the users and see if it works?
Then I thought about how hard would be to manage multiple versions of the same software, specially data, amongst different user. Certain features presented to the 1% might be incompatible with the other 99%. But that's a technical problem. Very hard to solve, but manageable. Then I imagined somekind of framework that would make communication between different versions of the data floating around easier, with "how to transform" data from-and-to version 1.1 and 1.2 easily.
Anyway, I am really curious, because it sounds like a good solution :)