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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.'"
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.
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.
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
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
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?
No, it doesn't get any beta than this.
And then you remembered your password?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
What a bizarre thing to say about a web app.
Hold my beer and watch this!