July 08, 2009

GOOGLE'S GMAIL has lost its somewhat dubious distinction of being the longest running program on the market to retain a "beta" designation.

Writing in his bog, Rajen Sheth, a senior product manager for Google Apps, said that Google had woken up one morning and decided that the software had met all its goals for "feature completeness".

Google has been adding features to its Apps Suite, including Gmail, to make it more appealing to enterprise customers, such as service level agreements (SLAs) guaranteeing over 99.9 per cent uptime per month.

Along with Gmail, the Internet search and advertising leader also lifted the dodgy-sounding beta software tag from its Calendar, Docs and Talk applications.

What seems to have changed Google's mind was likely the fact it was having a devil of a time selling the software with the beta tag still on it.

Sheth said that many of the corporations Google was selling to looked at the Apps SLAs and saw they weren't like a traditional beta, but still the beta tag was enough to dissuade some prospects from even evaluating the applications.