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Gmail is out of beta

googleblog.blogspot.com

11–20 of 51 posts

Re: Gmail is out of beta

#11
post #10

"We're often asked why so many Google applications seem to be perpetually in beta." It was a great lead-in, but he never did answer this.

I thought the common wisdom was that it's a matter of liability as in "hey, sorry we lost all of your emails but it was clearly indicated as a beta product; maybe next time you'll pay for the commercial version which has SLAs"

Re: Gmail is out of beta

#14
post #10

"We're often asked why so many Google applications seem to be perpetually in beta." It was a great lead-in, but he never did answer this.

I think he alludes to it with, "So we've focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark."

Achieving the goals of the "high bar" seem to be the key to getting out of beta. But five years? That's a really high bar.

Re: Gmail is out of beta

#15
post #9

One more thing for those who still like the look of "beta", we've made it easy to re-enable the beta label for Gmail from the Labs tab under Settings. This is silly and undermines the whole concept of a "beta" version. It makes it look like a fashion accessory more than anything, not an actual indication of product stability and completion.

I strongly suspect that's the point. What does "beta" mean on a web service that is continually updated by the developers in essentially realtime? The only real meaning I can think it has is the liability concerns that others in this thread have mentioned.

Re: Gmail is out of beta

#16
post #10

"We're often asked why so many Google applications seem to be perpetually in beta." It was a great lead-in, but he never did answer this.

I thought the common wisdom was that it's a matter of liability as in "hey, sorry we lost all of your emails but it was clearly indicated as a beta product; maybe next time you'll pay for the commercial version which has SLAs"

Except they already had a paid commercial version with SLAs, while the product was still labeled "beta."

Re: Gmail is out of beta

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the common wisdom was that it's a matter of liability as in "hey, sorry we lost all of your emails but it was clearly indicated as a beta product; maybe next time you'll pay for the commercial version which has SLAs"

Except they already had a paid commercial version with SLAs, while the product was still labeled "beta."

[deleted]

Re: Gmail is out of beta

#19
This feels like it has to do more with the changing culture at Google. A beta label would not have lasted this long at a company like Microsoft because the business team would not even consider it. They would have thought about the implications of companies hesitating to use beta software. I really liked google's gung ho techhead culture personally. I hope they find the right balance and not push their engineers into too much rigidity.

Re: Gmail is out of beta

#20
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they already had a paid commercial version with SLAs, while the product was still labeled "beta."

[deleted]

And yet you're exactly missing the point, the paid offering was also marked as beta. There wasn't a non-beta version.
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