San Francisco — Google has launched numerous of its products and services in beta. While some of them still holds the beta tag even after several years of launch, the company early this week revealed that it is contemplating pulling some of its online products out of beta, such as “Gmail,” in a move to widen their appeal among paying business customers, company officials suggested Wednesday.
Google is very well famous for retaining the “beta” label on large number of its products even long after they launch. The most outstanding example is Gmail, which has been available for five years and is used by millions of people, yet still stamped with “beta” tag next to the Gmail logo.
According to reports, Google executives speaking at a round table for press and analysts at Google’s I/O Developer Conference this week admitted that moves are underway to deal with the ‘beta’ brain-teaser, after a Gartner analyst IKen Dulaney said the practice is off-putting for some business users, who think of a beta as something that is still being tested.
“The move is intended at making these services more acceptable to paying business customers which tend to stay away from beta products.”
Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google’s enterprise products, initially responded that Google Apps Premier Edition, the paid version of Google’s online applications suite that comes with customer support and a service-level agreement, is not labelled as a beta.
Nevertheless, he admitted that many of the applications within the corporate suite, such as Google Docs and Google Calendar, still holds the beta tag next to the logo. “It is a minor annoyance and something you will witness being addressed in the near future,” he said.
Further emphasizing, Google Docs Product Manager Jonathan Rochelle said: “We are going to deal with that very soon; we are going to figure out a way to fix that.”
Rochelle added that the firm does not treat the applications as test versions, and that it was “almost traditional” for Google to retain the beta tag.
He did not gave details of how it would be fixed, but removing the beta tag seems a likely option.
Google has long been an ardent admired of beta status for its products. During its prospering time, Google launched new services such as Gmail and Google Maps at a rapid-fire pace. The beta tag offered a means to set expectations for service levels and remind users the applications were still being developed. It may even have added to their cachet, suggesting they were new and experimental.
“The term [beta] as we know it in the software industry and the way it is being used by Google is not really the same type of use,” Rochelle said.
“We are selling these products, and we do not treat them internally like they are a beta,” he added.
However, ever since the recent service breakdowns that Gmail and Google News customers have suffered, the firm is no doubt keen to reassure business users that its applications are stable, final release versions and are not still in the trial and development phase.