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?

[palegray.net]

Look, I keep trying to explain this, but nobody wants to listen to reason. Google's engineering population contains a high percentile of gamers, and they're not taking Gmail out of beta until Duke Nukem Forever is released. Geez, it's the second Slashdot story today I've had to comment in to point out these obvious parallels to the sinister ties between extreme gaming and our everyday lives.

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.

Re:Beta?

[YouWantFriesWithThat]

i used to have a lot of problems with gmail hanging, especially when dealing with attachments (either inbound or outbound). also had a stretch of time where it would never actually get to the inbox after i entered the login credentials, and i would sit at a white screen hours no matter what i did. but since i started logging in at the https version i have had no issues. YMMV of course, but give it a shot.

Re:Beta?

[elrous0]

Maybe Gmail 1.0 is sort of like Warp 10--something that can never actually be reached. By the time it ends, it will be up to Beta release version 0.99999997

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.

Why?

[Jurily]

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

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Humanity is still in Beta and most people don't seem to mind that.

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?

[codeButcher]

Humanity is still in Beta

... and that is probably flattering yourself.

Re:Why?

[gusmao]

You could say that not now.

Generally, the beta version is a prototype of the product that comes even before the release candidates. People don't usually pay for beta releases, and it's very uncommon for a product to remain so long in beta, especially when it is already stable, widely deployed and used daily by millions of users.

This curious fact generate especulations about the reasons for that, since so far, no good one was given. What if they decided for instance, that when Gmail is out of beta, the service will be no longer be free and a subscription model will be put in place? Or that the current storage will be available only for premium users? Or that the service will be simply discontinued? The beta versioning could easily provide an excuse for any of those or other changes that could directly impact you, especially after you come to rely strongly on the service.

Re:Why?

[Darth_brooks]

Is that why so many "Alpha Male" types are knuckle dragging meat heads?

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?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Frankly, I'd much rather have Outlook be gone, for several reasons:

  - Gmail is pretty solidly technically superior, in most of the ways we care about. Example: It doesn't fall over if you put several hundred thousand emails in the same "folder".

  - 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.

  - Gmail is platform-agnostic. It's actually annoyingly browser-aware, but all browsers are supported somewhat, and among the fully-supported browsers are Firefox and Safari, and Gecko and Webkit both exist for every platform I care about. That's one baby-step closer to Linux on the corporate desktop.

  - Google actually seems to support open standards -- for example, Gmail includes GTalk, which operates over Jabber. Email is available via IMAP, and calendars via caldav. Contrast to Outlook/Exchange -- the Halloween documents show that Microsoft deliberately chose proprietary protocols, as well as proprietary extensions/perversions of existing protocols.

Now, I'd still prefer we all start improving the existing open implementations, and get to where this is entirely open standard, commodity stuff, just like IMAP and SMTP is today. But Gmail would be a marked improvement over Outlook, in many ways.

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?

[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: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?

[SanityInAnarchy]

GMail doesn't work so well when your company of 400k+ people cannot access it through the company firewall and frankly yes, that is Google's fault.

It's Google's fault the company firewall is misconfigured?

a provider that has free services should not share a network with proprietary data.

...why not?

It's google's fault that every hack that can make a gmail account now doesn't know anything better than to think their new account is the k-rad 31337.

Yeah, because I totally used l33tsp34k all over my post, and Google told me to. Oh wait...

Browsers should NOT be virtual machines.

Why not?

Fuck you, I'm not getting off your lawn.

If you want to write an application, write an application. If you want to navigate data and present it, you use *HTML.

And the two are not mutually exclusive. Much as you might not like to admit, applications have been built on such unlikely platforms as VBA. Frankly, given the choice between that and the Web, I'll choose Web every time -- Javascript is a much better language than VB anyhow.

You don't make a single substantial point.

Nor do you. You state a few opinions, without really giving any reasons why.

Browsers should not be virtual machines, and proprietary data should not be on the same network as a free service, because teknopurge says so!

Let's start with that very simplest of claims: Browsers should not be virtual machines. Why not? Why shouldn't the browser be a generic application platform?

What a coincidence...

[VinylRecords]

This also marks the five year anniversary of me not using HotMail or Outlook Express.

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?

Re:What a coincidence...

[robot_love]

I read that as "Wordpress made me abandon monogamy".

I thought, "I must look into this 'Wordpress'".

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.

Re:Tag

[Starayo]

Hey! I'm going to finish it one day!

Gmail is a sandbox

[Basje]

Gmail is the beta for the Google Apps mail component. It's not likely that it will ever come out of beta status: it being beta has a function.

Re:Gmail is a sandbox

[Thanshin]

it being beta has a function.

f()?

Re:Gmail is a sandbox

[Thanshin]

f()?

crap.

P.S.: f() -> f(Greek small letter beta) ...

I'll go back to my cave.

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 . . . .

Consumer psychology

[threexk]

"Beta" is just being used as a buzz word to make Gmail perpetually seem like the hip new computer thing.

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)

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

[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.

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".

Re:Earliest adopter? (outside Google)

[u38cg]

No, but I could beat you with a stick made of pure solidified smugness. How's that for ya?

"Beta" for Gmail is still valid...

[pongo000]

...because there are still some very persistent performance issues that need to be worked out. The AJAX interface is incredibly sluggish on just about any browser/CPU combination I use it with. Very frustrating to have to wait seconds after each submit for the interface to respond.

This is further proof of the fallacy that just because something is affiliated with Google, it must be a good thing.

Long live mutt. (Don't laugh...the response time for mutt on even my slowest machine is several orders of magnitude greater than Gmail.)