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Google has, after 3 years, dropped the term “Beta” from its Blogger service. Does anybody else besides me think that Google is misusing the term “Beta” in applications? A Beta should be software under development, undergoing public scrutiny to find bugs and things that would make it better. Everything Google launches these days seems to have a “Beta” tag on it, which annoys me sometimes.

Of course, Beta software can be in that stage for lengthy periods of times while continuous feedback is received from external sources, and by doing so the product continuously evolves and (hopefully) gets better.

But I don’t think that’s why Google is doing all these Beta application releases. In my opinion, they’re just releasing many of these Betas just so they can say they have such a product on the market. If they truly are using these to get public feedback and improve, some sort of focus would be the order of the day. By concentrating only on one or few items at a time, they’d probably get the final product released more quickly in most cases, unlike 3 years for Blogger, and who knows how many years for GMail and GTalk.

Most of these applications are working fine, and instead of just hanging onto the Beta classification, I think it would be better if Google just launched them after a short Beta period, and updated them later on with new versions. After all, that’s what will happen to the non-Beta’s anyway, so why not just do it sooner?

Blog [Blogger] Read [ArsTechnica]

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