Why Is Gmail Still in Beta?

Some Joe Users now associate beta with a sort of brand. I once worked with a guy (who had no clue technically what he was doing) if I could take advantage of the "beta technology". When I asked him what that meant, he said, "you know, all the cool sites nowadays are using the beta!" When I pressed him further and had him sit in front of a browser and point to this beta technology, he finally just pointed out all the beta badges that the Web 2.0 sites were sporting.<p>So... maybe Gmail keeps the beta because now it's a brand association with being cutting edge and cool or something.

What do you mean take it out of beta? The name of product is "GMail beta" ;-)

its in beta because there is absolutely nothing for Google to gain by taking it out of beta

I don't understand people's obsessions with version numbers.<p>When I release a project, I start at 0.01, then release 0.02, and so on. The version numbers mean nothing to me, other than that they are increasing.<p>I still have people email me, though, and say things like, "I saw your project Foo::Bar, when do you think it will be 1.0?" I don't really know what to say...

From my point of view, Gmail is still in beta because its contact list functionality is still broken. I have to switch to "older version" to add new names to a contact list successfully, using Firefox, and bizarrely when I use Chrome, I can't display my contact lists at all in "new version" mode. There are still some JavaScript mysteries to the implementation of Gmail that no one at Google fully understands.

I think they keep it in beta because it hasn't become the app they want it to be yet. Google wants the end all email client not just a better alternative to hotmail/yahoo/msn et cetera.

it's in beta because they are still working out how to charge for it. When they do, it will be 'released'. My guess is they will charge for POP3 access and other little luxuries.

Must be a slow news day..

Because they dont have 100 million registered users testing the Gmail app for them everyday YET!