Slashdot Mirror
Google Considers Taking Beta Tag Off Gmail
Barence writes "Google is considering removing the beta tag from Gmail — and other online services — a mere five years after it was first launched. Google has become somewhat synonymous with seemingly endless beta cycles. Many of the company's most famous services, including Gmail, Docs, and Calendar all still carry the beta tag. Google now admits the eternal beta cycles could be damaging consumer and business confidence in its online apps. 'It's a minor annoyance and something you'll see addressed in the not-too-distant future.'"
That'll make things better!
It's a minor annoyance and something you'll see addressed in the not-too-distant future.
3000 A.D. Sha la la
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
But...but...is it READY?!
Because i still find it annoying to search for porn with my specific fetish.
(you heard me)
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
I believe more people probably know what Google means then they know what Beta means. Google has become the biggest of the BIG companies (without imploding or needing government bailout). 8 to 1 searchers use Google over Microsoft Search Engine, so what Google's 'beta' is, is really what the industry standard has become.
Hellmightfreezeover.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Gmail - Acceptance Testing.
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
Put a Beta Tag on Slashdot
(in case you can't read the comment titles)
Jesus. Why does Slashdot always look totally broken?
GMail Release Candidate 1.
Now that they have tested that it indeed can have outages, it is ready for release. Until they had outages, it wasn't fully tested.
Oh, no! Beta!
But that's the irony! Some (not all) of Google's Beta products are miles better than other "production" products. Go figure.
How can Google be taken seriously in an enterprise environment if their most stable and successful offshoot project takes 5 years to come out of beta? They should have done this 3 years ago or more. Gmail has been sufficiently stable all this time, yet this self-deprecating beta designation has constantly served as an admission of being non-committal to SLA.
They're just moving it to Gamma.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
GMail -- RC1
Can I get an invite? From someone? Please? I've been wanting to try out gmail for so long. You can contact me through my blog on Blogger...
...is one of those early 90s construction signs.
mmmm...forbidden donut
At last count (last fall) almost half of Google apps were labeled beta, so it's not just a few they're talking about. At that time, Google offered a convoluted explanation for the practice that included: "We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web, where people expect continual improvements in a product." More here:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/33131
Docs has been having problems recently with syncing. The biggest caveat of the whole cloud concept is "What do you do if you lose your connection to the cloud?" (Ok, one of the big caveats. The other is not having access to your data. If Microsoft went under tomorrow, your SQL Server won't disappear. Office will still run on the desktop. If a cloud company goes under, you may have a backup of the data from the app but who will be hosting it? They had code escrow back in the day, the company that wrote your app goes under, the source code is held in escrow and will be released to you at that time. You can hire people to perform maintenance.) Really, big business has seen this problem for decades. When offices are connected to centralized servers over frame relay and there's nothing at the remote locations but dumb terminals, losing the connection leaves you just as dead in the water as losing your internet today. Google's answer was the local cache. It works great for gmail, I can see them saying it's no longer beta.
The problem I've encountered with docs is that "docs list" window as they call it is having trouble syncing. You create a document on one computer, it should be visible on the other within a few minutes. You can see it if you do a page refresh. The problem is the local copy doesn't sync automatically anymore. You can make that happen by syncing manually or by opening the file up while connected to the net -- it will display the old version and then flash over to the new one as it downloads.
The problem arises when you think you're synced up and open an older document and start working on it. You last worked on it on Computer A yesterday. Computer B's copy is from four days ago. If you're away from a net connection when you open it on Computer B, you won't get a refresh and the automatic refresh you thought already happened didn't. So when you get back home you fire up Computer B so you can make sure it syncs back to the cloud, it will now try to reconcile two different versions. If you were working in separate parts of the document, you might get lucky. if any of your changes were made to the same paragraph, last edit wins.
These sorts of problems will be esoteric to the typical end user. I can see what's going on because I'm geeky. The end user is just going to get upset because something that "just works" no longer does.
You can't really complain about getting this kind of functionality for free but people will really start bitching if they have to pay for it.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
in fact, i am a recent ie convert to google chrome, for many reasons, but not least of which was the fact that slashdot looked like ass in ie
i thought it was some linux tribe thumb in the eye to microsoft: we're purposely going to make ie users suffer. ok, fine, i understand the passion to sabotage. but apparently the linux tribe hates google/webkit just as much, as the most glaring page display errors (weird dead white space in prominent spots, disappearing titles) are the same in chrome. cross browser support is one thing, but cross browser page rendering bug support is quite the accomplishment!
slashdot: fix your damn css. or at least enable old school html only. we are mostly hard core techies here, we can handle it, we don't need myspace eyecandy. please lose your insecurity over ajaxy digg stealing your show. we hate digg. but we don't want to hate slashdot too, for the sake of some really, really easy javascript/ css fixes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If it's really a beta product, they should dump all the user data before they take it to production. After all, it is just test data. No one in their right mind would be using a beta product as their primary email provider, right?
And then you remembered your password?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Leaving beta as a part of the name of a given service well beyond the normal limit was a marketing ploy. It generated lots of press and ardent discussion. The tact has run its course. They're removing it as another marketing ploy. That will generate another wave of press and ardent discussion. Ho hum.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I've been a GMail member since you had to get an invite to sign up (bought an invite off of EBay for $0.99) and my email has been inaccessible by both web mail and POP3/IMAP exactly four times. That's just around once a year. Any other email service I've ever had has had that many outages in a single year.