Gmail is out of beta | Hacker News Reader

Gmail is out of beta

googleblog.blogspot.com

140 pointsmcav45 comments

It's almost like they just wanted to ruin palsecam's argument: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=691365

Hah, I thought the exact same when I saw this!

Yeah, funny timing. I'm actually happy they ruined my argument :-)

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.

It's a self-deprecating joke.

By the way, if anyone's wondering, I verified that this Labs feature actually exists!

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.

That's not quite true. Microsoft had a Hotmail plugin in Outlook Express that was "beta" for at least 5 years. Microsoft simply used the term as an excuse to avoid supporting a product that people don't pay for. Sounds pretty similar to me.

From what I've seen on the inside of the company I would disagree. It's more likely that feature was so low priority that it never made the bar to be looked at seriously. I'm not bad mouthing the company. On the contrary they have some of the best minds in the world there. It's just the way company culture is at Microsoft. Much more than code goes into making their software which to say the least complicates things. I can elaborate but I guess I'll leave it at that.

"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."

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.

He does hint at it, but avoids saying anything concrete.

I had no idea GMail was even one of the "Google apps" (I thought that name meant their spreadsheet / word processor, but I guess that's "Google docs"). These were all completely different products, doing different things, sometimes developed outside by a company Google later bought, and developed years apart, so it's not clear to me why this particular set of products needs to be un-"beta"'d all at once.

It also doesn't speak to the more general question. I don't think their "beta" apps are inferior, in general, to their non-"beta" apps, so their "high bar" must be pretty crooked. :-)

They're sold as one big SaaS package to companies. They're taking the "beta" label off so said companies will stop bitching.

Yes, that's the obvious conclusion to draw in this case, but it still doesn't reveal the general rule.

For example, Google Groups has been out of beta for years, yet I find it unusably bad (e.g., no spam filtering or even killfiles so I have to hit "Older>>" about 5 times to see the next actual post), and based on a couple reviews I found just now, I'm not alone. I doubt they removed the "beta" label from GG so they could sell it as a service to companies.

I find Google Groups awful in terms of usability too !

It's extremely difficult just to find your own post, then you have to understand why you can't post here, that you must subscribe to this group first there etc etc...

No wonder they're switching to getsatisfaction (http://getsatisfaction.com/google/products)

I guess they would have been unable to capture a section of the corporate market with the beta tags.

What a lousy blog post. It doesn't even come close to telling us what Google's "out of beta" standard is. Just a PR stunt, and a badly executed one at that.

For google, "beta" is purely a PR label; this is because what "beta" normally is is an HR distinction, and Google doesn't work that way.

In more standard companies, the R&D team writes software up to, and including, the beta. Once the software is "released," the maintenance team steps in and the R&D team moves on. Google doesn't do this, so there's no meaning to a Google product being "in beta" or "out of beta."

The right answer to "why" is "because they couldn't get corporations and organizations to pay for Google Apps with a beta tag attached to any of the core offerings of the suite offering".

This is more than just an updated .gif, this is Google committing itself to its product. Good to see.

I think it's nothing more than an updated gif. Google Notebook was out of beta for a few years before they pulled the plug. Albeit the circumstances were different but Google has the power to uproot any of their products as they see fit without any real "commitment."

Already!?

This is the whole point of beta programs. They talk about you once when you release and again when you're out of beta: free PR.

I never thought I'd live to see the day-- I figured this would be something for my grandchildren's children to joke about.

ive been ignoring that "beta" label forever. completely forgot about it. huh.

Out of beta? More importantly, who do I call if I have a problem with my Gmail account?

The person / company you paid to use Gmail.

Sure. Tell me how I can pay to use Gmail?

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

$50 per user per year after trial

* The 99.9% uptime SLA for Google Apps is offered to organisations using Google Apps Premier Edition, as described in the Google Apps Premier Edition Terms of Service.

Interesting. Because when we were looking at signing up for the university version of Google Apps, they expected us to do our own tech support. Is it different for the corporate version?

This does not mean you can rely on Gmail now. Remember the recent downtimes. I use Gmail only as a secondary tool, relying on my own domain for business email and using another free email service.

Breaking news?

This seems totally reckless to me. Google is out of control!

You guys have no sense of humor.

Alright. Feed me the bad karma. I still think its funny.

Here's the joke, in case you didn't get it: "Releasing from beta after many years could not possibly be reckless, therefore saying that it is in an alarming manner is a HA HA funny time joke."

It may be funny, but it doesn't add much of anything to the conversation.

It's a rare joke that gets upmodded around here, but if it happens, it happens because it's also insightful and reveals something novel. There's nothing "novel" about "Google takes a long time to take things out of beta", which is why it's neither a good joke nor a good HN comment. In contrast, Paul Graham says a lot of funny things without even consciously trying because his essays are usually insightful enough to stumble across some surprising truths.

Also, complaints about being downmodded are usually, in turn, downmodded themselves. It's like a bottomless pit of negative karma for narcissists who care too much about the value of some integer on the YC webserver :)

EDIT: I'm not exceptionally interested in debating this. You seemed to not understand why you were modded down, and I explained.I don't really know you and have nothing against you, so I'm sorry if this seemed personal or hurtful.

As to jokes: I disagree fundamentally. This is a silly little article anyway. I come out about even on jokes karma wise. You know whats worse than a bad joke though? PG ass kissing ;)

Anyway, of course I knew I'd get more bad karma. I tend to enjoy it once in a while.

It is silly because beta/no beta is a binary decision, and the actual beta-ness of a product is a scaler.

So today they decide it has passed some arbitrary beta-ness threshold and the label goes away.

This and the fact it took five years with millions of happy users, all you can do is joke about it. Totally meaningless otherwise.

Thank you. This is a non-event. At least someone gets that and isn't looking for a 'profound analysis.'

False profundity makes for some of the worst comments.

Its cool broseph :) We're fine, and this has all bee nrelatively harmless. I retract my pooping on you.

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