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

Beta?

[Bored Grammar Nazi]

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.

Whatever the reason, it certainly is making people talk about it.

Re:Beta?

[AvitarX]

Witht he changes they have been making I actually feel the quality is degrading.

It has a lot of nice new features, but it feels like it is hanging a lot more often too.

It actually now feels more, not less like a beta to me.

Still in beta?

[Kuroji]

Well, despite that a lot of Google's products seem to still have the beta tag, it also means that they aren't necessarily going to be held to the same standard. For example, when Gmail decides to up and die for a few hours while they upgrade.

Re:Still in beta?

[v1]

GMail has imap, though you have to deliberately turn it on (it's off by default) and the switch isn't exactly glaringly obvious.

I believe the reason it's still "beta" is right now a LOT of people are using it as NON beta, for business, other important uses, or perhaps it's their only email address. Google probably knows that there's always that 1-in-1000 chance that something they do will break it in a way that causes data loss, or scrambles things badly enough for a few users that there won't be any reasonable way to fix it short of reset their mailboxes. When this happens, having the "beta" tag still on it will soften the public backlash a lot.

There's a couple ISPs in this area that have horrid email systems. One of them (Qwest) farmed out their email to MSN Live last year, and that has been an unrelenting nightmare for their customers. Whenever they approach us to help with their email, we convert them to gmail, and all of their problems instantly go away. That was after spending TWO hours on the phone being bounced between MSN and Qwest, each telling us that all the issues were the other's problem. We're very thankful to have GMail as an alternative to give to our customers.

GMail also happens to be the only imap email account I have, which is probably unusual since I have six of them, but that makes it something I can access from my ipod touch, which is a nice bonus. (yes it does pop too but you can't do concurrent pop on multiple computers without headaches)

I really do hope they keep it going, though I could personally care less if it never loses the "beta" tag.

Re:Still in beta?

[__aamnbm3774]

it also means that they aren't necessarily going to be held to the same standard.

You might not hold them to the same standard as other people do, but quite frankly, it is embarrassing someone as large and powerful as Google can't publish an EMAIL application release version.

is Google trying to prove something by saying 'nothing should ever come out of beta' or some other stupid philosophical meaning?

What point are they trying to make? Why won't you admit this is silly? Quit Drinking the Kool-Aid.

Why?

[Jurily]

Does it matter if it's beta when it's still the best and most reliable free email service around?

Re:Why?

[Thanshin]

Does it matter if it's beta when it's still the best and most reliable free email service around?

Quite the opposite.

When a friend told me he was closing a beta phase my first question was "Is it more stable than gmail?"

Re:Why?

[Jurily]

When a friend told me he was closing a beta phase my first question was "Is it more stable than gmail?"

If only more projects worked that way...

Re:Why?

[dirk]

It matters because it weakens the meaning of being in beta and confuses users. It used to be that beta was for testing. If you downloaded and installed a beta product, it was understood that there would be bugs and problems and they should be reported. With Google using beta as a constant tag (I remember ICQ used to do this back in the day to), users don't have a clear understanding of what a beta is anymore. They think beta is just a new product and don't expect bugs and don't report them. Open beta is a much harder thing to get useful information from if people judge your beta product just like they would a finished product, which is what is beginning to happen with places like Google tagging regular released like beta releases.

Re:Why?

[Kjella]

Being beta usually means something is missing. If you see beta software in "de facto production" like GMail is, it usually means that it was a proof of concept/prototype/pilot that people ended up using and relying on without the proper moves to production envinronments, handover from development to support, SLAs, backups, support channels and whatnot. Having a beta acting like a release is not a healthy sign, it's a sign of sickness. Whenever you have something that you want people to actually work with, not just fiddle with and test out it should be a release with all that encompasses. Introducing beta as the lowest support tier is just bullshit, it's per definition not an end-user release.

Re:Why?

[SwedishPenguin]

I'll admit that certain individuals may be in Beta, but as a group, I'd say we're all still in pre-Alpha unfortunately.

Re:Why?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Sysadmins doing backups is only part of the problem, and convenience is pretty valuable.

I had a longer post written, but then I realized you've got a gmail.com address obfuscated up there. Clearly you think the benefits are worth any real or imagined loss of privacy.

Re:Why?

[Jurily]

I had a longer post written, but then I realized you've got a gmail.com address obfuscated up there. Clearly you think the benefits are worth any real or imagined loss of privacy.

My internet persona is not a company.

Re:Why?

[Dog-Cow]

There's a huge difference between using gmail as a private address and a company using it for all corporate communications.

Re:Why?

[2short]

And that's exactly the problem. I tell people a build is "beta" and they think "Oh, like gmail... as stable as anything, half the world uses it all the time for important stuff, no problem" when I'm trying to say "Keep this the hell away from your production process, it hasn't been thoroughly tested so I assume there are horrible bugs in there somewhere"

Gmail is not beta. Google is misusing the term and screwing up the language for the rest of us. Excellent mail service though.

Tag

[daniduclos]

A Beta tag only makes sense if there is a "final" release planned at some point in the future. If it's going to be forever in Beta, it becomes meaningless, just like those web pages of 1999 with an eternal "under construction" gif.

Gmail is Effective .

[ajay_walia]

Beta no Beta it has been a Good experience using Gmail . Moreover it changed the Market freeing us of Quota's . . . .

Re:What a coincidence...

[threexk]

Or five years of Gmail user smugness.

Beta is meaningless

[krou]

Generally, any usage of the Beta tag is meaningless in the world of web-based applications. In fact, it's meaningless for most web-pages. The reason is very simple: a site should be constantly working to improve and change. The change that happens is not bound by the traditional software version release, either. All websites are, by default, in a perpetual beta, whether its users know it or not, which makes the label itself meaningless.

Re:Beta is meaningless

[Aladrin]

You definitely don't understand, then. Most professional websites are -not- live-tested on their users. There's a 'beta' behind the scenes with actual testers, not just random users.

Very few professional websites do what GMail is doing and have the 'beta' version be the live version.

And don't confuse 'having bugs' with being a 'beta'. All software has bugs, no matter what stage of development it's in.

Re:Beta is meaningless

[krou]

Sure, I fully admit I don't understand why people use the "Beta" label, except as some sort of marketing gimmick.

First, I didn't mention anything about bugs, so I wasn't confusing the issue in that regard.

Second, I would probably agree that most professional websites are not currently live tested, but the "users are testers" model is certainly what's being touted, and this is likely to become the norm because there are a number of benefits. The idea of release early, release often, and have dynamic A/B testing whereby features are presented to select groups of users renders the need for "Beta" obsolete. Amazon already does this.

But, the fact that we don't have live testing does not detract from the fact that the idea of a version for the user has no meaning. I mean, when did anyone ever ask themselves, "What version of Google is this?" In the age of websites and the internet, we think in terms of a service, not a piece of software. There are no upgrades, installations, or versions necessary. Beta is irrelevant, because sites are in perpetual beta.

Does this remove the need for internal versions, or internal labels? Of course not. They are as vital as ever. I can also accept labelling something as a Beta if the site is in private testing. But my point is that, to the user, versions simply don't exist in the same way as we're used to, and to have websites open to the public carrying the Beta label for 5 years suggests that it is nothing but a gimmick and lacks any real meaning.

It'd have been better if he didn't try to explain

[Anonymous Coward]

But the decision to drop Gmail's beta badge hinges on a few internal criteria (or, perhaps more accurately, feature requirements) that his team feels are still lacking.

I don't really mind the beta tag - sure it's dumb, but it doesn't really matter. Their explanation, though, is offensively stupid. Keeping a semi-permanent beta status on a stable and usable product because you want to add more features, features that obviously take several months or years to add, is simply an absurd redefinition of what beta means.

I wonder what their standards are to increment a full version number, and how many generations will have come and gone before that happens.

Re:What a coincidence...

[peragrin]

So that explains Mac users. People who enjoy being able to use their software are smug.

Does that make all windows users maschosists?

Wash your hands clean of it...

[greedom]

Google is notorious for keeping most of it's apps in the Beta stages because if it works, it's considered a fantastic app and when some hacker finds a huge security flaw in it or something of that nature, Google can just throw up their hands and say "Hey, it's still in Beta".

My Own GMail

[Doc Ruby]

Much as GMail is an interesting mail platform, I don't like the idea of Google getting all of my email to look thru, along with my entire contact list and traffic records with them. Even if GMail received and sent only encrypted messages, the metadata would be private. And Google already has my entire search history, as well as a lot of my click trail (REFERER incoming to searches, cached/PDF-to-HTML docs, YouTube, whatever might even run across a Google backbone). I don't need one filthy rich entity with cross-referenced records of my entire online activity.

If the GMail server were downloadable to my own server or independent ISP, I'd use it. I'd love it as software. But as service, it seems too tempting for Google to be evil.

Re:5 years of searchable private emails

[cryfreedomlove]

The decision to use gmail is voluntary. The growth of gmail is a strong signal that the market trusts Google or simply does not care about privacy.

Re:Tag -- Informative score goes to 11

[Fotograf]

it is plausible deniability front page for hidden community websites. You would be surprised how much few of them are alive. Oops. First rule of hidden community... Almost violated.