It has become a longstanding joke that Google never puts out final releases of its services, but the company acknowledged this week that the perpetual beta tag has put off some business users. As a result, certain services may soon become un-beta-fied.
To some people, jokes about Google's perpetual beta status on its services will never get old. But for business users considering paying for Google Apps, the beta tag can be kind of off-putting. It's for this reason that Google may end up graduating some of its most well-loved Web applications from beta to... not-beta sometime in the near future.
Google acknowledged the discrepancy during a roundtable discussion about the company's business offerings at Google's I/O conference this week. Though Google product management director for enterprise products Matt Glotzbach pointed out that Google Apps Premier Edition does not have a beta tag, many of the apps included in the package do. Indeed, Gmail is the most prominent example of this, followed by Google Calendar and Google Docs—all of which have been in fairly widespread use for some time.
More: http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/05/some-of-googles-services-may-ditch-the-perpetual-beta-tag.ars
To some people, jokes about Google's perpetual beta status on its services will never get old. But for business users considering paying for Google Apps, the beta tag can be kind of off-putting. It's for this reason that Google may end up graduating some of its most well-loved Web applications from beta to... not-beta sometime in the near future.
Google acknowledged the discrepancy during a roundtable discussion about the company's business offerings at Google's I/O conference this week. Though Google product management director for enterprise products Matt Glotzbach pointed out that Google Apps Premier Edition does not have a beta tag, many of the apps included in the package do. Indeed, Gmail is the most prominent example of this, followed by Google Calendar and Google Docs—all of which have been in fairly widespread use for some time.
More: http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/05/some-of-googles-services-may-ditch-the-perpetual-beta-tag.ars
