Samantha Rose Hunt01 June 2009, 2:15 PM
Google admits customers are getting sick of everything being in perpetual beta.
Google is finally thinking of stripping the beta tag from Gmail - along with some of its other cloud computing services such as Google Docs, and Google Calendar- only five years after their initial launch.
Though the company has never truly explained why their products remain in beta test for such a long time period, Google has always expressed that they remove the beta tag when the products are up to par, and meet performance standards.
However, the company has shown that where it has a will to do so, it can bring products out of beta far more quickly -- the Chrome browser was issued as a release version after a beta test of only 100 days, and has had several release version updates since then. Critics have accused Google of using the 'beta' tag to avoid criticism of its products by leaving them in an eternal testing phase, whereas other companies have the courage to put their reputation on the line and declare a product finished.
Gmail, however, has experienced some major outages recently, which may support Google's previous argument that products shouldn't be declared final until performance is up to scratch. Then again, millions of people rely on Gmail every day, and tens of thousands even pay for the professional "Google Apps" service which also claims to be in beta, despite having phone tech support.
Google admits its 'beta' tags have become meaningless. Speaking at the Google I/O conference, Google Docs product manager Jonathan Rochelle was quoted by IDG News Service as saying, "The term ‘beta’ as we know it in the software industry and the way
it’s being used by Google is not really the same type of use. We’re selling these products, and we don’t treat them internally
like they’re a beta."