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Google Considers Taking Beta Tag Off Gmail
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu May 28, 2009 08:25 AM
from the in-your-lifetime dept.
from the in-your-lifetime dept.
Barence writes "Google is considering removing the beta tag from Gmail — and other online services — a mere five years after it was first launched. Google has become somewhat synonymous with seemingly endless beta cycles. Many of the company's most famous services, including Gmail, Docs, and Calendar all still carry the beta tag. Google now admits the eternal beta cycles could be damaging consumer and business confidence in its online apps. 'It's a minor annoyance and something you'll see addressed in the not-too-distant future.'"
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Whew! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Whew! (Score:5, Funny)
No, it doesn't get any beta than this.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They can always move to Gamma release stage...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Beta late than never!
Re:Whew! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
In the not too distant future (Score:5, Funny)
It's a minor annoyance and something you'll see addressed in the not-too-distant future.
3000 A.D. Sha la la
Re:In the not too distant future (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps it will be 2101 A.D.? Move every 'Beta'.
Parent
Re:In the not too distant future (Score:5, Funny)
> 3000 A.D. Sha la la
Errr, that would be "Next Sunday, AD", actually.
Parent
GASP! (Score:4, Funny)
But...but...is it READY?!
Because i still find it annoying to search for porn with my specific fetish.
(you heard me)
Google Beta (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Google Beta (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Please tag this. (Score:5, Funny)
Hellmightfreezeover.
Re:Please tag this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. It's all Duke Nukem Forever's fault. Because that is no longer almost to be released, the entire structure of stuff that happens after hell freezes over is unraveling.
Parent
Coming soon... (Score:5, Funny)
Gmail - Acceptance Testing.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's no longer beta, it's gamma.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hahaha (Score:2, Funny)
There's no way GMail is ready for "release."
Re:Hahaha (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that they have tested that it indeed can have outages, it is ready for release. Until they had outages, it wasn't fully tested.
Parent
Re:Hahaha (Score:5, Funny)
And then you remembered your password?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Joking aside, I would imagine that Google's fear of incidents like these - and their inability to recover from them - are exactly the kind of thing that has kept Gmail in beta. That they're considering making it an official release is good news for those of us (I'm one) who rely on it - presumably they now consider their contingencies to have been well tested. Whether there will be a corresponding increase in their claims for its reliability, though, remains to be seen.
Re:Hahaha (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Hahaha (Score:5, Funny)
Can I get an invite? From someone? Please? I've been wanting to try out gmail for so long. You can contact me through my blog on Blogger...
Parent
Put a Beta Tag on Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Put a Beta Tag on Slashdot
(in case you can't read the comment titles)
Jesus. Why does Slashdot always look totally broken?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I liked the new AJAX comment form, but then they broke it. It's still functional, but the CSS is horked now.
i used slashdot in ie for a long time (Score:4, Interesting)
in fact, i am a recent ie convert to google chrome, for many reasons, but not least of which was the fact that slashdot looked like ass in ie
i thought it was some linux tribe thumb in the eye to microsoft: we're purposely going to make ie users suffer. ok, fine, i understand the passion to sabotage. but apparently the linux tribe hates google/webkit just as much, as the most glaring page display errors (weird dead white space in prominent spots, disappearing titles) are the same in chrome. cross browser support is one thing, but cross browser page rendering bug support is quite the accomplishment!
slashdot: fix your damn css. or at least enable old school html only. we are mostly hard core techies here, we can handle it, we don't need myspace eyecandy. please lose your insecurity over ajaxy digg stealing your show. we hate digg. but we don't want to hate slashdot too, for the sake of some really, really easy javascript/ css fixes
Parent
Re:Put a Beta Tag on Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot should be rewritten in RoR
'cause that will speed it up
Parent
Coming soon... (Score:5, Funny)
GMail Release Candidate 1.
Snake sez... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, no! Beta!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Tarnished reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
How can Google be taken seriously in an enterprise environment if their most stable and successful offshoot project takes 5 years to come out of beta? They should have done this 3 years ago or more. Gmail has been sufficiently stable all this time, yet this self-deprecating beta designation has constantly served as an admission of being non-committal to SLA.
Re:Tarnished reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
How can Google be taken seriously in an enterprise environment if their most stable and successful offshoot project takes 5 years to come out of beta?
Probably the fact that the version used by paying customers isn't a beta version? The "beta" version is the free-for-use version that they use to beta test any new features they add.
They should have done this 3 years ago or more.
Why? The free, public version is always going to be in a beta state since that's it's entire purpose.
Gmail has been sufficiently stable all this time, yet this self-deprecating beta designation has constantly served as an admission of being non-committal to SLA.
I'm pretty sure all the corporate customers they have would say otherwise.
Parent
Re:Tarnished reputation (Score:4, Funny)
Probably the fact that the version used by paying customers isn't a beta version? The "beta" version is the free-for-use version that they use to beta test any new features they add.
The corporate and educational versions are really no different from the free versions except that they changed the Gmail Beta jpg and added more storage. They still have a Google Labs Beta in the corporate version so that your employees can enjoy the benefit of unsupported toys like beer goggles.
Parent
Re:Tarnished reputation (Score:5, Insightful)
"How can Google be taken seriously in an enterprise environment if their most stable and successful offshoot project takes 5 years to come out of beta?"
The Beta tag let Google make changes that judge will make the service much better. These changes withouth the Beta tag are mostly "disallowed". Removing the Beta tag is much like a pact "We will not make mayor changes to the service, that will break your work". In my book great changes to make a service better is a good thing, the level of breaks of Gmail is high, but I can live with it. I will feel sad that the tag will be removed, because will mean maybe much less errors (or maybe not), but It will sure mean less and less enhancements of the service. And I blame the people like YOU.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Is email a service you can afford to lose because Google is playing with new features?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Is email a service you can afford to lose because Google is playing with new features?
If you can not afford to lose email service, then maybe you should not depend on Google to provide the service for free.
It's not that hard to setup your own email server and backup it up.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But your complaint is about a free service provided by Google. If it is that critical and outsourced, then you pay for an SLA. Last I checked there is no SLA for the free version of Gmail, only the paid versions Gmail offer any SLA.
The free version was perpetual beta because they were constantly testing new features.
Re:Tarnished reputation (Score:5, Informative)
Nah, Google now has the "Labs" tag in settings, so you can try out "beta" Gmail features (or stuff they just haven't yet figured out how to stuff into the interface.) In actuality, the only difference will be more clicks to turn on the new, untested stuff.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tarnished reputation (Score:5, Funny)
Why does it take a company with 10,000 engineers 5 years to make a 20 year old communications protocol stable?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing is that Google DOES sell a few SKUs of Google Apps to individuals and enterprises, and they do promise an SLA [google.com] of 99.9% uptime which they have failed to deliver during about 1/3 of all the months it's been available.
Not ready for release (Score:4, Funny)
They're just moving it to Gamma.
What comes after beta? (Score:4, Funny)
What GMail really needs... (Score:5, Funny)
Some background and Google's previous explanation (Score:4, Informative)
At last count (last fall) almost half of Google apps were labeled beta, so it's not just a few they're talking about. At that time, Google offered a convoluted explanation for the practice that included: "We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web, where people expect continual improvements in a product." More here:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/33131 [networkworld.com]
gmail is pretty damn solid -- docs has problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Docs has been having problems recently with syncing. The biggest caveat of the whole cloud concept is "What do you do if you lose your connection to the cloud?" (Ok, one of the big caveats. The other is not having access to your data. If Microsoft went under tomorrow, your SQL Server won't disappear. Office will still run on the desktop. If a cloud company goes under, you may have a backup of the data from the app but who will be hosting it? They had code escrow back in the day, the company that wrote your app goes under, the source code is held in escrow and will be released to you at that time. You can hire people to perform maintenance.) Really, big business has seen this problem for decades. When offices are connected to centralized servers over frame relay and there's nothing at the remote locations but dumb terminals, losing the connection leaves you just as dead in the water as losing your internet today. Google's answer was the local cache. It works great for gmail, I can see them saying it's no longer beta.
The problem I've encountered with docs is that "docs list" window as they call it is having trouble syncing. You create a document on one computer, it should be visible on the other within a few minutes. You can see it if you do a page refresh. The problem is the local copy doesn't sync automatically anymore. You can make that happen by syncing manually or by opening the file up while connected to the net -- it will display the old version and then flash over to the new one as it downloads.
The problem arises when you think you're synced up and open an older document and start working on it. You last worked on it on Computer A yesterday. Computer B's copy is from four days ago. If you're away from a net connection when you open it on Computer B, you won't get a refresh and the automatic refresh you thought already happened didn't. So when you get back home you fire up Computer B so you can make sure it syncs back to the cloud, it will now try to reconcile two different versions. If you were working in separate parts of the document, you might get lucky. if any of your changes were made to the same paragraph, last edit wins.
These sorts of problems will be esoteric to the typical end user. I can see what's going on because I'm geeky. The end user is just going to get upset because something that "just works" no longer does.
You can't really complain about getting this kind of functionality for free but people will really start bitching if they have to pay for it.
Test data (Score:5, Funny)
If it's really a beta product, they should dump all the user data before they take it to production. After all, it is just test data. No one in their right mind would be using a beta product as their primary email provider, right?
Marketing Ploy (Score:4, Insightful)
Leaving beta as a part of the name of a given service well beyond the normal limit was a marketing ploy. It generated lots of press and ardent discussion. The tact has run its course. They're removing it as another marketing ploy. That will generate another wave of press and ardent discussion. Ho hum.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)