Today is a landmark day for Google. The company has finally announced that Google Apps is no longer in beta. I suspect this is more of a way to increase the adoption of its services, particularly among businesses, than any new accomplishment being met, but it is what it is. No more beta label on Gmail and other products that fall into Google’s cloud offerings category.
On the official Google Blog, Matthew Glotzbach, Director, Product Management, Google Enterprise writes:
Ever since we launched the Google Apps suite for businesses two years ago, it’s had a service level agreement, 24/7 support, and has met or exceeded all the other standards of non-beta software. More than 1.75 million companies around the world run their business on Google Apps, including Google. 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. So we’ve focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark.
Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta. “Beta” will be removed from the product logos today, but we’ll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there’s a small “beta” beneath the logo. Indeed, today we’re also announcing some other Google Apps features that we think will appeal to large enterprises: mail delegation, mail retention and ongoing enhancements to Apps reliability.
Clearly the removal of “beta” does not mean that these are the final versions of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk. I think it’s safe to say that Google will continue to add new features just as it always has. At least the company is apparently comfortable enough with the services that they are certain users can rely on them.
Unfortunately some of the services have been known to see the occasional outage in recent memory, but as a user of some of these services, I have to say that they have been pretty solid for the most part in terms of being accessible.
On a sidenote, Google has included a new lab in the list of gmail labs that allows you to put the beta logo back on. Somebody out there will want to do this. It’s called “Back to Beta.”
