Gmail Finally Out of Beta!

OK, so today was a little better for Google (GOOG). Even if its good news was largely semantic.

Today, Google announced that its various enterprise applications—Gmail, Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Talk—work well enough to no longer be prefaced by the beta appellation. Apps are considered in beta phase when they're good enough for the public to use on an interim basis but haven't quite reached the point where the company is absolutely confident in their utility. No upgrade preceded the announcement; Google's engineers merely looked over the products and were satisfied that they were ready for prime time. "We've focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking our products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark," wrote product management director Matthew Glotzbach in a blog post.

Of course, this begs the following questions: Why were so many apps in beta for so long? And why remove that tag now? After all, Gmail has been in beta for a remarkable five years. New York Times scribe Miguel Helft thinks that it all has to do with marketing enterprise software services to companies that are notoriously gun-shy when it comes to changing computer systems. This move, he writes, "could help Google's efforts to get the paid version of its package of applications, which includes Gmail, Calendar, Docs and other products, adopted inside big companies. Corporate technology managers tend to shy away from beta products, and Google wants to remove any barriers to adoption that it can."

Google Apps already enjoys a nice customer base; the search giant claims that some 1.75 million companies use its suite of enterprise software at the moment. And TechCrunch writer Erick Schonfeld notes that the number of people who use Gmail has grown an astonishing 48 percent in the last year. By removing the beta tag from its products, Google is announcing, in its own unique way, that it's ready to get serious about this market.