Gmail Marks Five Years In Beta 194
TrekkieTechie writes "Though in fact the big day was April 1st, Google celebrated the five-year anniversary of the popular online email service Gmail with a post on the service's blog, saying 'we want to give a big thank you to all of you who use Gmail every day, to those who've been around since the beginning, to those who were using an AJAX app before the term AJAX was popular, to those who started chatting right in your email ... we couldn't have gotten here without you.' The milestone has also prompted speculation about when, if ever, Gmail will lose its beta status, and Ars Technica recently sat down with Todd Jackson, Gmail's Project Manager, to discuss the reasoning behind that nagging beta label."
Gmail is a sandbox (Score:4, Interesting)
Gmail is the beta for the Google Apps mail component. It's not likely that it will ever come out of beta status: it being beta has a function.
Consumer psychology (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
You could say that not now.
Generally, the beta version is a prototype of the product that comes even before the release candidates. People don't usually pay for beta releases, and it's very uncommon for a product to remain so long in beta, especially when it is already stable, widely deployed and used daily by millions of users.
This curious fact generate especulations about the reasons for that, since so far, no good one was given. What if they decided for instance, that when Gmail is out of beta, the service will be no longer be free and a subscription model will be put in place? Or that the current storage will be available only for premium users? Or that the service will be simply discontinued? The beta versioning could easily provide an excuse for any of those or other changes that could directly impact you, especially after you come to rely strongly on the service.
Re:Still in beta? (Score:3, Interesting)
Right. Contrast this to something like Google Search, which, on the very few (like, three?) occasions it's ever been down, everyone assumed that it was their own Internet that was at fault.
That's what I would assume the criteria would be -- Gmail will come out of beta when it's as stable as Google's other services that are out of beta.
Of course, TFA seems to be operating under a different definition of "beta". IMAP is certainly a feature I would demand from a service like Gmail, but it really isn't a measure of stability.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Frankly, I'd much rather have Outlook be gone, for several reasons:
- Gmail is pretty solidly technically superior, in most of the ways we care about. Example: It doesn't fall over if you put several hundred thousand emails in the same "folder".
- Gmail moves the data off of the end-user's computer. Far, far too many Outlook setups (especially in small businesses) store everything locally, with no backup -- one hard drive crash away from all that archived email gone.
- Gmail is platform-agnostic. It's actually annoyingly browser-aware, but all browsers are supported somewhat, and among the fully-supported browsers are Firefox and Safari, and Gecko and Webkit both exist for every platform I care about. That's one baby-step closer to Linux on the corporate desktop.
- Google actually seems to support open standards -- for example, Gmail includes GTalk, which operates over Jabber. Email is available via IMAP, and calendars via caldav. Contrast to Outlook/Exchange -- the Halloween documents show that Microsoft deliberately chose proprietary protocols, as well as proprietary extensions/perversions of existing protocols.
Now, I'd still prefer we all start improving the existing open implementations, and get to where this is entirely open standard, commodity stuff, just like IMAP and SMTP is today. But Gmail would be a marked improvement over Outlook, in many ways.
Earliest adopter? (outside Google) (Score:1, Interesting)
I joined on April 12, 2004 (invited by a Google employee).
Can anyone who didn't work for Google at the time beat that?
Re:Beta? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What a coincidence... (Score:3, Interesting)
The only thing you can't be smug about is bandwidth use. Gmail overuses XML for everything and thus inflates bandwidth usage dramatically. I couldn't even change my fucking settings on a modem because I couldn't bring up the page before the timeout. No kidding.
"Beta" for Gmail is still valid... (Score:4, Interesting)
...because there are still some very persistent performance issues that need to be worked out. The AJAX interface is incredibly sluggish on just about any browser/CPU combination I use it with. Very frustrating to have to wait seconds after each submit for the interface to respond.
This is further proof of the fallacy that just because something is affiliated with Google, it must be a good thing.
Long live mutt. (Don't laugh...the response time for mutt on even my slowest machine is several orders of magnitude greater than Gmail.)
Re:What a coincidence... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted. Just figuring you understand some of the implications, both ways.
Let's say I want to duplicate Gmail. I'd start with some sort of IMAP server. I'd put it on something like RAID (or better, ZFS), then replicate that setup on at least one other machine -- probably via DRBD. I'd put both of them on a UPS, and I'd still take regular backups, in case people delete something they don't mean to.
Then, I'd add webmail by picking one of several open source projects (the first that comes to mind is Squirrelmail, but I'm sure there are better), which can use IMAP as a storage system.
Then, I'd setup a webserver with webdav enabled, and train people to use Sunbird (or something similar) to share calendars. And a Jabber server, and of course, an SMTP server (probably Postfix).
Then, I'd still be short some of the groupware functionality (how do I send an invitation that someone can click on from their email, that will automatically add the event to their calendar?), and the webmail likely wouldn't be as good, though some users will appreciate the ability to use standard IMAP clients.
All the while, I'd be billing my own hours, and the company would be paying for all the hardware involved -- half of which would necessarily be sitting idle, and possibly more. I don't know what Google charges for corporate-level Google Apps, but I doubt it's more than my salary.
So, much as I'd like that job, this is something I think it makes sense to outsource. Unless you're large enough to run your own datacenter, you'll be outsourcing other things, anyway -- hosting, for example. Is a company based on Amazon Web Services "surrendering all its data"?
(To any recruiters reading this: I actually wouldn't mind that job, even if I don't agree that it's the best approach.)
If the issue is that Gmail might go away, there are backup scripts available, and IMAP access makes it easy to write more -- and if you've got a domain (cheap), you can migrate off Gmail later without having to switch email addresses or lose mail. If the issue is that Internet access might go away, Gmail has an offline feature -- I believe it uses Google Gears. If the issue is security, use https://mail.google.com/ [google.com] -- you could even block access to it at the corporate firewall/proxy, if you have one.
Now, look at my own email address -- I already have a server I keep in my house, to play with. I put email on it, and bought a domain (when I was 15 -- it seemed cool at the time). I'd rather Google doesn't have my data, and I'd rather have the freedom to add whatever features I can write. So I do see your point.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sysadmins not doing backup is one thing, but how is surrendering all your data because it's convenient better?
You're not "surrendering your data" any more than you would be if you hired Acme Outside Contractors, Inc. to run your infrastructure.
Businesses using GMail would actually be using Google Apps [google.com], which operates contractually the same as any other IT contractor, with all the legal requirements for non-disclosure that entails and an enterprise-level SLA.
This is not a free service, because of the aforementioned legal/SLA requirements. But it is certainly cheaper than running your own Exchange server and gives your employees more features and better usability than Outlook. If your only reason for opposing it is some vague aversion to storing your data on iron you don't own, then you need to come join the rest of us in the 21st Century, where outsourcing, contracting, and offsite storage are the norm and contractual requirements for proprietary data storage are built into every vendor agreement. Google Apps is no different in this respect; it's just another contracted vendor, albeit a vendor with kick-ass software and 3 nines uptime.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
GMail doesn't work so well when your company of 400k+ people cannot access it through the company firewall and frankly yes, that is Google's fault.
It's Google's fault the company firewall is misconfigured?
a provider that has free services should not share a network with proprietary data.
...why not?
It's google's fault that every hack that can make a gmail account now doesn't know anything better than to think their new account is the k-rad 31337.
Yeah, because I totally used l33tsp34k all over my post, and Google told me to. Oh wait...
Browsers should NOT be virtual machines.
Why not?
Fuck you, I'm not getting off your lawn.
If you want to write an application, write an application. If you want to navigate data and present it, you use *HTML.
And the two are not mutually exclusive. Much as you might not like to admit, applications have been built on such unlikely platforms as VBA. Frankly, given the choice between that and the Web, I'll choose Web every time -- Javascript is a much better language than VB anyhow.
You don't make a single substantial point.
Nor do you. You state a few opinions, without really giving any reasons why.
Browsers should not be virtual machines, and proprietary data should not be on the same network as a free service, because teknopurge says so!
Let's start with that very simplest of claims: Browsers should not be virtual machines. Why not? Why shouldn't the browser be a generic application platform?