Wait. “Gmail Beta” Isn’t a Registered Trademark?
by John Paczkowski
Posted on July 7, 2009 at 9:24 AM PT
Gmail is finally out of beta. Five years after it was launched, Google’s email service has gone gold and shed the beta label, having met whatever mysterious criteria the company uses to assess final-release software. Also freed of the beta label, the rest of the Google Apps suite: Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk.
Seems that Google (GOOG) has finally realized that it wasn’t doing itself any favors in enterprise by essentially advertising Apps as an immature product suite. IT managers are easily spooked at the mention of the word “beta.”
“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,” Matthew Glotzbach, Director of Product Management for Google Enterprise, wrote in a post to the company blog. “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.”
That mark presumably being the point at which Google is ready to guarantee uptime and reliability to end users….
