Culture

Google Apps out of Beta and into Adulthood

by Truemorist | July 7, 2009 at 10:56 am

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Gmail is all grown up now! After five years, Google Apps are out of beta, past the gangly, buggy adolescence of large-scale testing, and into the adulthood of general release. The parents are so proud.

What does this mean for us, the users of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, or Google Calendar? Not much. However, it positions those applications as business-ready: in other words, ready for purchase.

Enterprise versions of Google Apps will have more features and, ostensibly, speedy support for when the cells in a Google spreadsheet take on a life of their own. Which happens to mine all the time.

For most users of Gmail and Google Calendar, today's news is little more than a lifting of the "beta" label for these already-reliable Google services. But Google says removing the "beta" label is a big deal for the businesses that it hopes will switch to Web-based Google services--and away from software-based services offered by Microsoft and IBM.

And, yes, you can still get free versions.