News breaks that Google is no longer calling Gmail a beta version.  And everyone is left … baffled.

I mean first of all, it hasn’t really been a beta version for years.  It hasn’t even been some super-secret closed private (in theory anyway) trial service in years.  It’s been nicely public and released for a very long time.  The only thing about Gmail that was still beta was the damned logo.

But on top of that, just what made it not beta anymore?  Well, the fact that businesses typically don’t trust beta software is what made it not beta anymore.  It wasn’t a certain amount of testing.  It wasn’t a certain confidence in the software.  In spite of the fact that that is exactly what beta means.  In-house testing is Alpha testing.  When that passes muster it goes to limited customer-based testing, called Beta testing.  And then when that is cleared as good-to-go, it’s released.

Only somewhere along the line, Google, software mavens they are, seemed to have forgotten the little details like that.

Oh, sure, alpha, beta, they may be all Greek to you.

But to the software industry, these things are industry standards for testing and quality assurance.  Standards that, as Google becomes more like Microsoft, seem to go out the window for Google … just as they did for Microsoft.  Not because doing things differently is the “right” way to do things, but simply because they’re just too big and important now to do things the same way everyone else does them.  That wouldn’t be “cool”.

And the really sad testament to the sheep we people are, is that folks are already freaking out over the loss of the beta logo.  They’ve  become so used to seeing that their software is constantly in beta (which is a bad thing by the way, because it means it never has finished testing) that now that their software is officially considered tested and good to go, they’re forlorn.

Bah!

Whatever.

Does any of it really matter?

So Google keeps their software labeled as beta for far too long after, just because.  And then on a whim one day decides to take away the beta and call it released, not because it has been tested, but because they’re afraid of losing money from Big Business.  It was so ridiculous that it was a joke on Google to begin with.  So who cares?

The same as how Microsoft supposedly tests their operating systems and then releases them, but IT departments and computer experts world-wide know those first releases are actually the equivalents of beta-tests, and won’t move over to the newer version of an OS until the first service pack hits, because that’s when the problems found during testing are finally fixed in Microsoft’s world.

It’s all a joke.  They do business stupidly, we adapt.  Simple.

So none of it really affects anyone.

But for some reason, people pretend to care anyway.

Whatever makes them happy.

But we know better.