Some of Google's services may ditch their perpetual beta tag
Some of Google's services may ditch their perpetual beta tag
May 28, 2009 12:10 PM CT
To some people, jokes about Google's perpetual beta status on its services will never get old. But for business users considering paying for Google Apps, the beta tag can be kind of off-putting. It's for this reason that Google may end up graduating some of its most well-loved Web applications from beta to... not-beta sometime in the near future.
Google acknowledged the discrepancy during a roundtable discussion about the company's business offerings at Google's I/O conference this week. Though Google product management director for enterprise products Matt Glotzbach pointed out that Google Apps Premier Edition does not have a beta tag, many of the apps included in the package do. Indeed, Gmail is the most prominent example of this, followed by Google Calendar and Google Docs—all of which have been in fairly widespread use for some time.
"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," Google Docs Product Manager Jonathan Rochelle said, according to IDG News Service. "We're selling these products, and we don't treat them internally like they're a beta."
This hasn't changed how the business community sees Google's quirky use of the word beta, though—Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney pointed out that many businesses assume it means the products are still being tested and aren't in their final stages. "It's a minor annoyance and something you'll see addressed in the not-too-distant future," Glotzbach said.
There are some Google products that aren't designated as betas. Google Maps, Chrome for Windows, Blogger, and Google's newspaper archive are just a few, making us wonder what differentiates these products from those with the beta label in Google's eyes. After all, Gmail has been out since 2004 (apparently so long ago that our old article about it is something like three site redesigns behind)—what's it going to take to turn that puppy into a final release?
:source: Source: http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009...al-beta-tag.ar
