Are Betas Taking On Lives of Their Own?

Ant writes "CNET News.com's Paul Festa thinks the final stage of software development, beta versions, are taking on a life of their own, as companies tinker endlessly with their products in public according to a recent article. Google is one of the companies that keep using "beta" term for years for its products."

Comments

Re:GMail

[EyeMyke]

IIRC, betas are mainly used for bug fixing, not for new features, that's mainly a pre-beta thing.

Re:GMail

[Veky]

Hmmm, if everyone who wants an account has one, why do they have the 'invite' system? Why not just let everyone sign up and take it out of 'beta'?

IMO, it works better then captchas for ensuring _humans_ open accounts. I personally can't get an account, Just email me (or anybody else with a gmail account), and you'll get an invite. You don't have to use it forever, just try it.

and by the sounds of things I don't want one, I don't like the idea of some corporation spying on my entire e-mail history.

Really?

• Corporation you work for?
• Other webmail providers you've maybe used?
• Carnivore? (yes, it's not a corporation, but does it really matter?)
• ...

The list is long. Google is no different, it is just honest about it.

Also it doesn't really seem to offer anything over the other webmail systems.

What other _free_ webmail system you've seen that offers:

• 1GiB of space
• sending of attachments up to 10MiB
• unlimited filters and categorizing options for your mail
• no image ads
• automatic phishing detection and disabling links in phishing emails
• speed almost of local application (on my computer, usually even faster)
• Domain Key Signing support
• unlimited POP access
• really useful search that actually works, and works fast (it's Google after all)
• autocompletion of recipient fields from addressbook
• email address plussing
• at least 32 variations on your username by default, _besides_ plussing
• feedback system that reacts within minutes, and fixes your problems within hours
• spam filter with >95% accuracy (atleast for me)
• clean and well designed UI
• giving you three months of inactivity before it puts your account to sleep
• ability to put any information you want in addressbook, and search through it all
• labels instead of folders, so you can have orthogonal categories without extra effort
• reliability better than most commercial solutions
• full Unicode (UTF8) support

and so on... I surely think it's much more advanced than any other webmail around.