GoogleMail still in Beta - After FOUR years?

(By Richard Holway 9.00pm 25th Feb 09) At the end of my post yesterday – Twitter alert on GoogleMail outage , I asked why the 4 year old GoogleMail was still in Beta. I was directed by a reader to this post on NetworkWorld which contains this quote from “a Google spokesperson”:

"We have very high internal metrics our consumer products have to meet before coming out of beta. Our teams continue to work to improve these products and provide users with an even better experience. We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web, where people expect continual improvements in a product. On the Web, you don't have to wait for the next version to be on the shelf or an update to become available. Improvements are rolled out as they're developed. Rather than the packaged, stagnant software of decades past, we're moving to a world of regular updates and constant feature refinement where applications live in the cloud."

The implications of this are rather mind-boggling. So everything now is to be forever a ‘work in progress’? Or perhaps, as the reader pointed out, it was so Google could never get sued. As in “It is only a Beta version so you should expect it not to work sometimes”. But after 4 years and 113m users?

I was also directed to a report on the Google outage on BBC News “Google itself relies on the service and press spokespeople for the firm were unable to e-mail journalists with statements regarding the problem”.

My convoluted sense of humour rather likes the “we cannot tell you our services are down because our services are down”.

Footnote – I asked the reader who answered my query if I could quote his name. The reply I got was “No. My boss reads UKHotviews and I should be doing something else... !” Personally I’d give the guy a promotion.