Gmail Marks Five Years In Beta

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."

Comments

Re:Why?

[Jurily]

- 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.

Sysadmins not doing backup is one thing, but how is surrendering all your data because it's convenient better?

Re:Consumer psychology

[shish]

Either that, or the published reason: A feature all google services must have is "profit", and gmail is still lacking that feature. (FYI: I'm using the paid-for google apps bundle, and it's not marked as beta)

Re:5 years of searchable private emails

[Baricom]

Those are web clips - it's a mini-RSS reader that lives above the Gmail interface. If you don't use the feature, you can turn it off in Settings.

Why didn't they bake a real cake?

[imbimp]

I made a Google Analytics cake and it wasn't even an anniversary... http://www.imbimp.com/2009/03/google-analytics-dashboard-cake/

Part of it is already out of beta

[snowwrestler]

Google Apps Premier Edition does not have a beta label and even provides a 99.9 uptime SLA. It also provides legal language covering confidential data and intellectual property, for those who are concerned about Google managing their business data.

I think the "beta" remains on the consumer free edition because they are still not sure if it will turn a profit, and they do not want to provide an SLA. I'm not even sure what an SLA would look like on a free product.