Google Officially Drops the Beta Tag

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GMail out of betaAs we predicted on SitePoint three days ago, Google has quietly dropped the “beta” tag from all their main applications:

It is also apparent that beta has been removed from Google Reader, Google Translate and Google Maps.

This action has been a long-time coming. GMail was introduced five years ago. Initially limited to invited-users only, the system has grown to be the most popular webmail system on the Internet. It was one of Google’s first Ajax-enabled applications and many people use it in preference to a dedicated email client.

Google’s official blog post makes the reasoning clear: they want to remove any doubts about Google Apps being a mature product suite. A new marketing effort will encourage business users to adopt the products and GMail will receive several new features specifically aimed at the commercial market:

  • email delegation — a feature that allows administrative staff to screen and send email on behalf of others in their company
  • email retention — a policy system for IT administrators to control when emails are purged (to comply with country and/or industry regulations)
  • disaster recovery — features such as priority handling for business users’ email and live data replication
  • migration tools — to help business users’ switch from Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.

Google has re-iterated that the standard versions will remain free for private users.

Is this the first sign of Google growing-up and becoming a business-aware corporation? Will dropping “beta” have a significant effect? Will it intensify their on-going battles with Microsoft?

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Craig BucklerCraig Buckler
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Craig is a freelance UK web consultant who built his first page for IE2.0 in 1995. Since that time he's been advocating standards, accessibility, and best-practice HTML5 techniques. He's created enterprise specifications, websites and online applications for companies and organisations including the UK Parliament, the European Parliament, the Department of Energy & Climate Change, Microsoft, and more. He's written more than 1,000 articles for SitePoint and you can find him @craigbuckler.

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