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Google Apps no longer in beta, Google OS on the way
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Just after Independence Day, online monolith Google made a monumental change to its cloud services, known as Google Apps. Google Mail, commonly known as GMail, and their Google Docs suite are now no longer "beta" projects. While the Internet celebrates this historic event, most will never get the joke.
For those unfamiliar with programming terms, "beta" is a development term expressing a stage of pre-production. Just like in the Greek alphabet, beta follows alpha, which is also (but rarely) used in public pre-releases. Software is often pre-released as betas to test real-world application in real use before final releases. Upon further inspection after the change, there's no major change post-beta, although Google did implement a modification to the label system that everyone insists should be replaced with folders. The fact of the matter is, Google has been adding features and functionality to GMail to years without making a big deal out of it and when take out the tag that insinuates it's an unfinished project, nothing major has been done. The truth is, Google used "beta" as a way to let everyone know that GMail will never be finished. It's a rhetorical hint that the service will always be in development and everyone should look forward to the next bell and whistle. One day, that whistle will include universal Exchange support.
In a mocking response to Gmail years ago, cloud photo service Flickr (now owned by Yahoo!), rebranded their service from beta to gamma, which is unheard of, which is all part of the joke. The joke is, by now, that "beta" no longer matters. Google killed the significance of beta by keeping an open, available producted branded with it. Beta used to mean a private test copy, available only to those who consider themselves "beta testers". Betas are still used, as with Firefox 3.5 months before its final release. However, the general public might be taking the news about Gmail and Google Docs leaving beta too seriously. Nothing has changed other than Google will change things whenever they feel like it. The truth is that "beta" was hurting the marketing. Implying that the product is unfinished deters major (paying) clients from adopting it and replacing their old system.
And hot on the heels of this announcement, Google shocked the world once again with the announcement of a new computer operating system. According to Google, it will be independent from Android, the Google OS that powers mobile phones like the HTC G1 and upcoming Hero. It will actually be similar to their Chrome browser and will share the name.
Like all Google products, it will likely be free for personal use and open source, allowing it to be adopted by those unable or unwilling to pay for proprietary OS licenses. But also like Google products, it will likely have a cost for enterprise use, much like Gmails extra storage quota, but no pricing has been announced. Of course, the way that Google makes its products free is through advertising. Google search and Gmail are cluttered with personalized ads that crawl available data to make the advertisements more appealing. There's no word yet on how this will be implemented in the Chrome OS, but expect Google to have some way of making money off of a "free" product.
The aim of the OS is to give more speed to current computers and run on minimal/old computers that won't run the more robust systems. Google's blog press release states, "Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web."
It's safe to assume that the Chrome OS will include the Chrome web browser, but there's no word yet on the European Union targeting Google for anti-competitive practices by not including other browsers.
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