Day 8 of NaBloPoMo 2007

In the last few days the weather had been great.

Following a couple of days of constant drizzle, the temperatures have plummeted from the hot, ugly, stinking, dirty, selling-poison-lollipops-to-school-children low thirty degree weather from a couple of days ago, to comfortable, nice, pleasant-smelling, clean, volunteering-at-the-local-orphange mid-twenty degree weather.

Needless to say i am enjoying it.

Work today wasn't as bad as i was expecting it, which probably means that tomorrow will be disaster-filled and terrible. Always the optimist I am!

Anywho, onto a real topic. As regular readers will know, i am a massive fan of Gmail. It's so awesome it should be made into an awesome factory that produces free products of awesomeness.

But something has been starting to annoy me lately: when the heck is Gmail going to come out of beta? I've had my account exclusively for two years now, and since then Gmail has opened up registration to anyone regardless of invitations, released a heck of a lot of features many of which the competitors don't have, and it is fantastically reliable.

So why the need for it to be still in beta? Surely the product has matured enough, is stable enough, and is widely used enough for the 'beta' tag to be dropped. In all likelihood it's more likely a legal thing than a software development lifecycle thing: i reckon as long as it's in beta, if people complain about anything at all to do with Gmail, Google will point to the logo and the b-e-t-a and give the user a big wet raspberry and go naaaa-na-nan-na-na (well, everything except that last part).

Drop the charade Google and 'release' the damn product already!