Google and Phony Betas
February 17, 2009
I believe Google when it slaps a “beta” label on a service. Google’s system was built to deliver results to queries. The reading and writing functions are a little bit of wizardry, a dash of hack, and some old fashioned rethinking of known problems of massively parallel distributed systems. Think Chubby and its file and record locking and unlocking function in the context of Google’s scale of operation.
Now Macworld’s “Don’t Be Fooled by Google’s Phony Beta Label” by Mike Elgan tied to convince me that Google’s beta label is bogus. The argument is that Google is playing a marketing game. I don’t agree. I think that many of Google’s beta products and services are closer to alphas. The vaunted GMail is still in beta and it should be. My sources have suggested to me that the GOOG continues to twiddle the knobs and fiddle with the settings of GMail. The system is improving but it is not yet fully mature. The Postini functions are sort of there, but not fully integrated. I could generate a list of these issues with GMail, but I want to point to the most interesting comment in Mr. Elgan’s write up:
The truth is that designating new features as “experimental” and announcing them only on a blog is just a charade, a marketing gimmick. It’s just Google’s way of having it both ways. It launches apps and features that grab market share, attract eyeballs and give it the traffic it needs to make billions of dollars per fiscal quarter. But gosh, gee, it’s just little old us trying out a few ideas, so don’t criticize! Hey, we can all play that game. This publication you’re reading now uses a revenue model similar to Google’s. You’re reading this for free, but the publication makes money by selling the advertising you see on this page. The publishing company pays me to write it out of money earned from those advertising dollars.
I am not a sufficiently silly goose to do much with Gmail, my Google Apps account, or some of the other Google gizmos that I explore. In fact on February 14, 2009, my AdSense report was not available. Yep, beta even though Google is like an elephant balancing on its revenue trunk with its advertising service. If you can’t get advertising right, I ask myself, “When will Gmail be ready for prime time?” The Chrome gizmo is out of beta and I think it should be in alpha in my opinion.
Interesting write up.
Stephen Arnold, February 17, 2009
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