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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

What a coincidence...

[VinylRecords]

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

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: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.

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.

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?