Freeze 'n' Breeze

Gmail? Excellent , superb, it rocks! This what every users say about it . But have you ever wondered why “Gmail or anyother gmail product or service is still in BETA!” What does BETA mean to Google? Before discussing it lets see what the word “Beta” actually stands for .

“Beta describes the state of an application during its development, when it has more or less full functionality but is still being tested.
During Beta, bugs can still occur so users of the software are made aware of this. New functionality can still be introduced though it’s not that common at this stage.
Following beta, the application is considered almost ready for launch. It becomes a release candidate and then goes through a phase of extensive testing prior to release”.

But how does Google decide whether an product/service is stable and out of BETA? It seems, Google considers BETA as a final release for many of its products and services.

Have you ever seen Google BETA when the company formed in 1998? See this Google BETA (1998) page from Web Archive

At least Google.com is not in BETA now!

Funny Error message to turn user attention:

“Bad, bad server. No donut for you. Unfortunately, the orkut.com server has acted out in an unexpected way. Hopefully, it will return to its helpful self if you try again in a few minutes. It’s likely that the server will behave this way on occasion during the coming months. We apologize for the inconvenience and for our server’s lack of consideration for others.“

Those are the common error message when the gmail server encounters heavy traffic. In this way google developers show their sense of humor and turn the user attention ( Good Strategy ) .

Eventhough Google keeps rolling out new features in Gtalk , Gmail , orkut etc but someone needs to draw Google’s Attention and say on fixing some bugs users experience with it.