Google Considers Taking Beta Tag Off Gmail 180
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.'"
Whew! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Whew! (Score:5, Funny)
No, it doesn't get any beta than this.
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They can always move to Gamma release stage...
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Beta late than never!
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What would be kind of humorous, in a sadistic kind of way, is if they decided to just cancel the GMail project.
Since its in beta, I don't think they'd have any liabilities since people should know not to use Beta software for production usage.
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people should know not to use Beta software for production usage.
But we paid for the service!
Oh. Wait....
Re:Whew! (Score:5, Funny)
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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'.
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Move every 'Beta'.
Follow every (data) stream?
Mmm, tag. Mmm, tag. (Score:2)
Re:In the not too distant future (Score:5, Funny)
> 3000 A.D. Sha la la
Errr, that would be "Next Sunday, AD", actually.
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If that's supposed to be a MST3K reference, the correct lyric is "Next Sunday, A.D." The gag, of course, is that Sunday afternoons is when most TV stations fill programming gaps with godawful movies, the type that MST3K mocks. (Also: that you wouldn't normally qualify "next Sunday" with A.D.)
The Satellite of Love never ends up in 3000 A.D., but it does spend a few episodes in the year 2525, but unfortunately you can't pick your son, pick your daughter too, from the bottom of a big glass tube. I'm pretty sur
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)
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You could always set up a separate gmail account specifically for your specific-fetish porn.
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Google Beta (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wait? "BETA" is the NEW industry standard?
I thought releasing shoddy untested products allways was the industry standard.
Re:Google Beta (Score:5, Insightful)
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And it will be the first production software release ever, which is actually production quality.
Most software's actual beta cycle starts with the production release and what most call beta is actually a slightly cleaned up alpha.
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Government bailouts???
Ok. The successes of the big three in the US FAR OUTWEIGH those of Google. In their development, they defined America and the world.
You can't say that Google is great because it didn't implode over a little recession.
The big three didn't need bailouts during the great depression.
Yes they're floundering now. But that's partly due to their past successes which lead to a bloated company, high pensions, large salaries, and many many different models.
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.
Coming soon... (Score:5, Funny)
Gmail - Acceptance Testing.
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It's no longer beta, it's gamma.
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Forget beta, forget gamma, it's time we went... PLAID!
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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.
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GMail has ALWAYS had outages, there have been whole days where google told me it couldn't log me in, or just looped back to the login page with no message.
Re:Hahaha (Score:5, Funny)
And then you remembered your password?
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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)
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Don't get me wrong, the uptime on Gmail (and really, all google services) is fantastic and to me, proves the validity or even superiority of their computing model. However, to say that they've only had one outage would be extremely disingenuous.
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You drew an incorrect inference. What I said (which was at worst vague) was that gmail has always had outages. They have, in fact, had them before. They were actually somewhat numerous in the earlier days. I had more than four of them personally. Contrastingly, I did not experience any downtime during the last flap.
Don't read into my comments what isn't there, and you won't experience this confusion again.
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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...
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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?
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Perhaps it should be Web 2.0 RC1?
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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
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Any reason you won't use Firefox? I've never seen any of these display errors people complain of. At least not on my desktop. I have to turn js off for Opera on my phone.
i like firefox (Score:2)
i have complaints about all browsers, and i'll always root about and try new ones, looking for that perfect browser that doesn't exist. i have no fixed interest in or allegiance to chrome
currently i'm feeling chrome more than firefox only because it has more... chrome. little eye candy and user interface tweaks i like, like resizable textboxes, highlighting of current input, expansive screen real estate, fast tabbing
i don't like the fact chrome doesn't have a drop down history of urls like firefox or ie. bu
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thanks! (Score:2)
that works ;-)
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Yeah...turn off javascript. Seriously all this "Web 2.0" crap makes my web browser jump all over the place on the main slashdot page. Why can't it just be a simple layout without all the mess? I've got two devices that have embedded Opera...works great everywhere except slashdot, where it sends the browsers into high-cpu hell trying to render all this junk.
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I guess I'm failing to see what is broken. Everything looks good to me. I can even see the subject lines on each post...
Re:Put a Beta Tag on Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot should be rewritten in RoR
'cause that will speed it up
Coming soon... (Score:5, Funny)
GMail Release Candidate 1.
Snake sez... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, no! Beta!
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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.
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.
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Hence it took them 1 year to develop gmail, 1 year to get it into beta, and then 5 years to figure out what the heck they built (design), how to handle the traffic (system configuration), how to handle the users (requirements) and how to maintain it (documentation).
.
Funny thing is if they did it in a non-agile way, it would have taken them the same time, and looking at the way they executed/deployed it, along with the popularity of Google,
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.
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Is email a service you can afford to lose because Google is playing with new features?
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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.
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Of course it's easy to run your own mail server, but it's even easier and possibly more cost-effective to outsource it. But would you trust outsourcing to a company in perpetual beta? My original post is about Google's reputation for their long beta cycles, not how feasible the alternatives may be.
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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.
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My point isn't necessarily that they are correctly or incorrectly labelling their product as Beta - my point is that it's been in public beta for 5 or 6 years now and that makes this company, with record profits and over 10,000 engineers, incompetent.
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?
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because it's a 20 year old protocol?
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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.
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And so *those* customers have a broken SLA and can do whatever is necessary to recover that. If they have a brain, it includes some sort of financial compensation and/or going to a different provider - standard contract terms, in other words. But that's no excuse for branding the whole of Google "enterprise-worthy" without being party to such an SLA.
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All I'm suggesting is that each of Google's projects contribute to its overall image in some small way, and perhaps some people will perceive artificially prolonged beta periods as a problem with quality control. I'm not saying it's true - I just thing it may have been unwise from a purely superficial standpoint.
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I use Google For Your Domain (now called Google Apps) on a couple of my websites as well, and since they're non-commercial websites I couldn't be more thrilled with the service. I used to run my own Windows email server (using a wonderful daemon called MailEnable) but one day a spammer broke in and brought my Pentium 3 server to its knees by flooding the outgoing queues. Since switching to Google I too use my own branding and greatly enjoy the spam filtering.
For little mom and pop shops and for hobbyists
Not ready for release (Score:4, Funny)
They're just moving it to Gamma.
What comes after beta? (Score:4, Funny)
In other news... (Score:2)
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What GMail really needs... (Score:5, Funny)
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NBD (Score:2, Insightful)
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]
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I expect continual improvements in any product that isn't dead. Web-based or otherwise. Beta just means it's not quite ready for serious use yet. Though Google and some OSS software has had very good "betas" for years.
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.
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Honestly, if your documents are that important to you, you owe it to yourself (and any clients) to work on them locally. IMO the best thing about Google Docs is Gmail integration. It's still useful to a whole class of user which doesn't really own a computer; maybe they have a fancy cellphone or something.
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?
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WHOOSH!
Seriously can somebody mod the GP Funny?
So when (Score:2)
all the companies that put "Beta" after the name of their services to look as cool as Google will remove it?
Release candidate 1 (Score:2)
Yay! Finally we are in the release candidate stage! Another 5 years we may see ver 0.1 build 3!
Btw, iPhone support on slashdot sucks! My 5th time trying to post this comment
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.
The gmail interface is still slow as hell... (Score:2)
...which is why the first thing I do when I connect is click the "HTML for slow connections" link.
Which is silly, because I don't consider my cable or business connections very slow. In fact, most websites load just fine. Gmail simply...well, let's put it this way: By the time I get the gmail interface up, I will have already checked my personal e-mail on another machine using mutt.
Why does Google believe we want all the "enhanced" interface that really does nothing to enhance the interface?
Beta late than never (Score:2)
All Beta jokes aside, Google is warping (eroding) the definition of beta. GMail left beta when invitations were no longer needed to get an account. Even then, they were stretching the meaning.
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Wouldn't happen to be Truman State University, would it?
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You're not doing it right. Labels are far superior to folders.