Mountain View, California — In its relentless endeavor to make its software more attractive and appeasing to win more corporate customers, Google on Tuesday finally took an important decision, beginning with removing the "beta" tag today from some of its core applications, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs and Talk. For Gmail, the oldest component of Google Apps, this marks the end of over five years in beta.
The beneficiaries of this change will be Google’s both enterprise and consumer versions of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk that now out of beta or testing mode, Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise, wrote in a posting on the company’s blog.
"Beta" tags will be discarded from the logos of Gmail and other products starting from Tuesday, Glotzbach said in the blog posting. "We will continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there is a small ‘beta’ beneath the logo," Glotzbach noted.
Google’s tradition of keeping many applications in beta for a long time has puzzled its growing number of business customers — 1.75 million companies, including its latest large convert to the cloud, Fairchild Semiconductor. With the removal of the beta "scarlet letter," companies can finally rest assured that Google Apps is 100% bug free.
For example, the Gmail e-mail service has been wrapped up with the beta tag for more than five years since it was launched in 2004. That longstanding beta phobia had literally affected business buyers’ decision whether or not to buy the Google Apps product, industry analysts say.
"Many enterprises were asking the question, ‘why would I want the beta tag for my most mission critical enterprise app [e-mail]?" says Matt Cain, a Gartner analyst who has researched businesses’ use of Google Apps.
Now, Google is also releasing some specific improvements to Apps, which includes the Sites wiki and site creation application and Google Video, a YouTube-based video-sharing service for business, will have no beta-labeled components, including the power for someone to delegate use of their mailbox and for administrators to set policies and parameters for e-mail retention.
Nevertheless, discarding of the beta label from these services is rather the "culmination" of a long-lasting process of maturation through which the products have exceeded internal goals for reliability, quality and usability, Glotzbach said.
Glotzbach also mentioned that Google lacks a regular set of criteria across its different product groups for determining when a product should and should not carry the beta label.
"We have not had a consistent set of standards across the product teams. It has been done individually. We are going to fix that," he said.
Google has finally realized that enterprises do not view beta labels on a product as a positive sign of consistent innovation, which is how Google has historically defined the term, Gartner analyst Matt Cain said.
The move probably is the result of an intense debate inside Google, which the realists in the Enterprise group ultimately won, since they are the ones who have to hit the street and try to sell Apps to senior IT executives, Cain said.
In many large companies, distributing beta-labeled code for essential applications, such as e-mail, is simply out of the question, he said.
"It was a fundamental misreading of the enterprise market," he said. "Google did not understand that in the enterprise, beta is not a good thing. It is a bad thing."
The company is now witnessing on an average one large company adopting Apps Premier per week, Glotzbach said. Google defines a large Apps account as one with 1,000 or more Premier seats.
On Tuesday, Google is announcing another such customer win. Fairchild Semiconductor is moving about 5,500 end users in 18 offices worldwide from Lotus Notes to Apps Premier, which costs $US50 per user, per year.
"We have been knocking down barriers one by one for enterprise adoption of Apps Premier," he said.
"We have a different classification of what we think brings something out of beta," says Rajen Sheth, a senior product manager at Google Enterprise, the division of the company that manages Google Apps. "It has been a question we regularly received from businesses, and now this finally answers that question. Google Apps has matured greatly during the past year."