Rub your eyes... GMail comes out of beta at last!

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 7 Jul 2009 at 17:18

A day that many never thought they'd live to see has finally arrived - GMail is out of beta.

Launched on April Fool's Day in 2004, GMail's perpetual beta status has become something of a running joke.

Today, the company announced that GMail and a variety of its other Apps are dropping the beta tag in a bid to convince businesses that they're fit for purpose.

"We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase," the company's director of product management, Matthew Glotzbach, claims in a post on the Official Google Blog.

"So we've focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark."

Google doesn't state what its requirements are for lifting the beta tag, and the synchronised shift out of beta certainly suggests that the change may be cosmetic, more than anything else.

Indeed, Google says it will keep on developing the services as before. "'Beta' will be removed from the product logos today, but we'll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there's a small 'beta' beneath the logo," Glotzbach says.

"Indeed, today we're also announcing some other Google Apps features that we think will appeal to large enterprises: mail delegation, mail retention and ongoing enhancements to Apps reliability."