Google is considering removing the beta tag from Gmail – and other online services – a mere five years after it was first launched.
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.
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