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Stop the Internets! Gmail is no longer beta!
MeepZero
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Take a look at your gmail and google calander pages folks. The "Beta" label is gone!
Look news!
Lets take this time and reminisce about when we first started Gmail, our joys, woes, and other stuffs. Back when we decided how awesome it would be to have both searching and email in one place, back when we gave all of our personal information to google so it could catalog everything we do.
Isn't it just wonderful, I feel like singing!
Look news!
Lets take this time and reminisce about when we first started Gmail, our joys, woes, and other stuffs. Back when we decided how awesome it would be to have both searching and email in one place, back when we gave all of our personal information to google so it could catalog everything we do.
Isn't it just wonderful, I feel like singing!
All of your private data...
Look at the reason for editing
MeepZero on
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PSN: TheScrublet
This.
This is my first thought when I think beta. Totally fucking ruined.
It's not that they ruined "Beta". It's that the term was obsolete to begin with.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
1) A limited-access preview of a final product or
2) An opt-in "latest and greatest" program with more frequent updates but less reliable code
The concept is that you let a few people deal with the cutting edge in order to improve it for the masses. Gmail screwed this up basically when they kept the Beta label after opening up the service for general signups.
If the code had been less reliable, then it would have been okay to keep the beta tag? That's silly.
I think its fine that they kept beta until they got all of the features they felt should be there, such as themes and such, which are actually fairly recent (very very recent for hosted gmail).
PSN: SAW776
No, if they had two sets of code, one stable and updated less frequently released to the general public, the other less stable and updated more frequently to a restricted audience, then that set of code could be called beta. And in fact they probably do exactly that, and I'm guessing they have to come up with a different name for it.
Then the "beta" label means absolutely nothing. When you're developing something on the web you're always adding new stuff and fixing bugs. If you pick some arbitrary feature bar and say "once we have that, we're no longer in beta", the term ceases to mean anything. You look at a web service and see a "beta" label on it? What can you expect from such a service? Maybe it's something brand new and maybe a bit buggy and you need to get an invite to use it. Maybe it's an extremely mature, years old, feature packed, well-supported, high-infrastructure and high-uptime enterprise-scale application that hasn't yet met some absurdly high, undefined feature bar.
Maybe, in order to judge a product's quality, you can't rely entirely on their branding for accurate information.
I think this has been true for longer than Google has been around.
Dead on. In most SW engineering books, guidelines, and what have you, alpha-testing is defined as an environment where selected users work a system with the developers watching. Beta-testing is an uncontrolled environment among limited end-users where the developers aren't present, and users periodically report problems. We've started to see more open-betas (such as Win7, or test servers on MMOs), but it isn't debatable that the end-user demographic is the same on the beta as it will be on the delivered product. The group of people that buy and use Windows 7 will be much larger and different than the Win 7 beta. The test servers on those MMOs are much smaller populations compared to live servers.
Gmail's population, outside of some businesses, is not going to change significantly from this announcement. I guarantee you a huge chunk of people won't even notice.
PSN: TheScrublet
Make no mistake: when you release a product or system to the general public, by definition it is no longer beta. The second that Gmail didn't require a referral or a key or however they did that initial signup period (I've forgotten), Gmail was no longer in beta. Any beta running as long as Gmail is simply being called beta so the company can cover its ass if it doesn't work. I guarantee you that this will become more and more common as the consumer backlash against required patches continues to increase. I think we all know which operating system version we have to thank for THAT antipathy.
PSN: TheScrublet
If Win7 is a good example of a beta (and is open to the general public) then I don't see any issue with acknowledging that gmail is more than a user-side application and, despite being open to the public, can still be beta software when the server side of things aren't finished yet.
While Windows 7 was an open beta, it was both limited in time and scope. Windows 7 was only in actual public beta for, depending on the date you use, 9 months in the worst case. Additionally, they made a well-defined transition into release candidate, which then obviously had to "finish" as the code was released to manufacturing. Gmail was in beta for just over half a decade, almost two and a half years of which were open. And arguably more than that considering the ease of getting admittance to its closed beta near the tail end.
Windows 7 has an actual release. It is being made available, with warranty, to OEMs, retail outlets, etc. During beta, Windows 7 was only available as a download, with absolutely no guarantees. By contrast, Gmail "ending" its beta program has had no effect at all! It is just as available, with the exact same features, as it was before. Its posted terms of service from 2007 have not changed at all. Namely 14.2: YOU EXPRESSLY UNDERSTAND AND AGREE THAT YOUR USE OF THE SERVICES IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK AND THAT THE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND “AS AVAILABLE.â€
My opinion is that Google removed the beta label because some businesses flat out refuse to use something labeled beta, and that situation finally became unacceptable to Google.
PSN: TheScrublet
No new mail, as no one loves me.
Again, my point is not that from the user end of things everything wasn't done. My point is that gmail isn't a program that runs on someone's computer, it's a program that has a user-end and a server-end, and particularly because part of making gmail a finished product was ensuring that the server end can actually scale with the internet --on the long term, since that's the only place google exists as a company-- the extended beta label can perhaps make sense.
From such a viewpoint (as a test of scaling) it's perfectly reasonable that google started gmail as a limited invite-based system to test it and it's response to growth on a small scale, then gave more invites (after which followed the natural repercussions of such a thing happening on the internet), then tested it with completely open signups under the full flood of the internet. Again, to anyone using it the service might have seemed finished by the closed invite stage or certainly by the open invite stage, but that doesn't mean everything was finished on the server end of things as the service itself coped with scale.
So you've stated the the dropping of the beta label changed absolutely nothing from both google's and the end users point of view. And that google doesn't have to guarantee anything because it's expressly used at a users risk.
And at the same time stated that now businesses will use it. Which, something tells me, makes a bit of a difference to Google.
Don't you think they might have been concerned about rolling out something so ambitious on such a large scale and burning people with a poor level of service if things didn't pan out somewhere between user 10 million and user 100 million? Gmail is a lot more than webmail (a business wouldn't be interested were it so,) and it has to scale with the growth of the internet in a way required by few (if any) products out today. In a test of scale, 5 years of 'beta' makes a lot of sense.
Um, no? Beta software is software which is feature complete but not fully tested. It is common in the open source world to release beta software to the general public (usually with a disclaimer) so that it can be tested. Wikipedia agrees with me, infallible source that it is.
But yes. There was pretty much no way that Gmail could have been accurately described as a beta after the first two years.
The open source world is so drastically different I would be hesitant to bring it into a discussion. Once you get outside the MAJOR open source projects, the definition of release, patch, etc., gets so fuzzy it's hard to really tell when something is in beta, or pre-release, or whatever.
Ego, I agree with your first two paragraphs (except for your use of the extremely generic, open-ended term "extended beta"). And I think you're saying if a product is going to be on the internet for a very long time, than you feel that a beta might be appropriately longer to compensate. What I'm saying is bolded in the above quote. It's reasonable to expect that in 4 years, Gmail might look and behave differently than now, or scale to even more users as the Internet grows. Should we keep it in beta for that eventuality? Or call it what it is: an upgraded version of a previously functioning program?
Google had what it had at the end of the first few months of open beta: a reliable free e-mail system that scaled to, picking a number out of thin air, 10 million people, with larger amounts of storage than previously seen. Fast forward to today: now Gmail integrates with calendar, a home page, themes, etc., with MORE storage, and 100 million users. Calling the in-between time a beta is ridiculous. I'm sorry to say, nothing online will EVER be finished on the server side, period. I'm sure alphamonkey can speak to the truth of that, constantly modifying the back-end of this forum to deal with its growth.
To be frank: there is nothing anyone will ever say to me that will convince me that half a decade could be called a beta, and not ongoing development or some other such task.
PSN: TheScrublet
PSN: TheScrublet
And if it does become a trend I'm not sure why it should be an issue. Especially with web services. Maybe it would even be a good thing with a web service. Maybe it would encourage people to keep backups of the stuff they entrust to the web-service so that if said "beta" service goes down then the user's loss is minimized.
I'm sure most people using Gmail didn't give a shit whether or not the beta tag is there. Again, I'm just unsure why people are peeing themselves and gnashing their teeth about this.
What useful information did that beta tag provide you at the beginning of Gmail that no longer applied as of Monday? None? You just knew Google felt their product was not where they wanted it yet? Maybe they thought it hadn't been stress-tested to the point they wanted yet? Who knows? Not me.
Google felt the product was not finished/tested to the point they wanted yet. I have no clue how we've come to the conclusion that that behavior was in any way an "abuse" of the beta label.
I guess I have a problem with beta tags not providing useful information. Maybe I'm in the minority. I don't like beta being used as a tag for years and years of ongoing development until some business necessity forces it out. It's supposed to be a technical tool...Google's desire to attract businesses should not impact the start or end of a beta period at all.
edit: No Google didn't "feel like the product wasn't finished/tested yet". They wanted businesses that won't sign on to a beta label. That's all this was.
PSN: TheScrublet
From the link in the OP, chief:
"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," wrote Rajen Sheth, senior product manager, Google Apps, in a blog post announcing the changes.
PSN: TheScrublet
The product is never "where they want it". Do you think they're going to stop development of new features now? By "where they want it" do you mean "they have not developed it to the point where they want to remove the beta label"? So, in essense, seeing the "beta" label on something means you know the company hasn't felt like taking it off yet. Brilliant.
PSN: TheScrublet
Though I have been shown by Scrublet (and agree now) that Google's reasoning here for finally removing the beta label is a bit dumb.
No sweat, and I do realize that
I just want to point out again, no other software has had to scale as much as gmail has had to scale --all through it's beta period. I think the beta label had a lot more to do with that than some bizarre desire for google to fuck around with people and start some weird slippery slope trend where somehow a beta runs forever and is shitty software but somehow also people pay for it (which is what you're worried about, right?)
Google sure would have looked bad if they'd removed the beta tag, then said at a later date 'ok, turns out we can't actually keep up this many sign-ups, so we're closing them.' I think that's exactly why the beta ran as long as it did.
I'm not saying 5 years isn't a long time. But if Google wasn't sure they'd be able to keep the service going forever and didn't know how it would react to the full flood of the interwebs the beta label makes a lot of sense to keep.