Is Google finally ready to take beta tag off Gmail?

 

Gallery

By Barry Collins

Posted on 28 May 2009 at 09:39

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.

By contrast, the company's Chrome browser was brought out of beta after only 100 days and has already raced to version two, despite only launching in September.

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," says Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google's enterprise products, according to a report on ComputerWorld.

Pressed for further details, Google Docs product manager Jonathan Rochelle claimed: "We're going to deal with that very soon; we're going to figure out a way to fix that."

Google's motivation for keeping products in beta has never been clear, with the company continually insisting that it will remove the tags when the products are ready.

The suggested move out of beta comes in the wake of two recent Google outages, which have seen the search engine and Gmail suffer from rare periods of downtime.

PC Pro's top five stories

4. A Vista SP2 warning