Notice something missing in that image? It took five years, tens of millions of users, a couple of notable outages, and countless email messages, but Gmail is officially out of Beta, finally. Why do I care? After Gmail’s last big outage about a year ago, I posted a bit of rant about the ridiculous beta status and got the most comments I’ve ever gotten on a post for it.

Anyway, according to The NYTimes Bits Blog

Gmail is finally shedding the beta label, signaling that Google considers the product to be fully baked. Google is also taking three other applications — Calendar, Docs and Talk — out of beta.

The bottom-line reason for the change given in the post is that Google is standardizing its definition of “beta” for its products in an effort to make some inroads into the corporate productivity sector. However, I think another aspect is at play here. Gmail was first launched on April 1, 2004. Could this be the end of the longest running, and least funny, Google April Fool’s Joke ever? To be fair, Google does have a sense humor about its long-running beta label.

via Gmail and Other Google Apps Finally Shed ‘Beta’ Label – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

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