Google Apps Exit Beta. Seriously!

Have you picked yourself off the floor yet? It's no lie, Google Apps, which includes Gmail, is finally out of beta. Gmail had been in beta for five years.

In fact, Gmail had been in beta for so long we wondered if Google simply forgot it was in beta. Here's what the company said on the official Google blog:

Ever since we launched the Google Apps suite for businesses two years ago, it's had a service level agreement, 24/7 support, and has met or exceeded all the other standards of non-beta software. More than 1.75 million companies around the world run their business on Google Apps, including Google. 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. 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.

Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta. "Beta" will be removed from the product logos today, but we'll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there's a small "beta" beneath the logo. Indeed, today we're also announcing some other Google Apps features that we think will appeal to large enterprises: mail delegation, mail retention and ongoing enhancements to Apps reliability.

In a way, this is reminiscent of when Google removed Chrome from beta: it almost sounds like they are doing it simply because a "non-beta" tag is necessary for companies to adopt Google Apps.


At the same time, except for some issues with the "cloud" itself, we think Gmail has been ready for beta to be removed from its logo for some time. All we can say is: finally.