Back in April, there was apparently a lull in the news cycle, and the tech blogosphere trotted out one of dead horses it likes to flog on a rotating basis. Something in me triggered the last time we all felt the need to weigh in on the topic, and I exploded all over my blog about it:

Why Do We Care Why GMail is Still in Beta?
Why do we care if there’s "Beta" after the title? A large number of us obviously trust it well enough to carry on as our primary email. We might as well call it GMail Mxyzptlk.

Does using the word Beta somehow harm us as a species or as users of the service (or even as users of the word “beta”)?

[…]

The other way you can look at it is the same way everyone in the movie The Princess Bride looked at Paul Wallace’s character Vizzini’s use of the word “inconceivable!”

He kept saying it in reference to things that were clearly happening, and finally Inigo says to him: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

It’s a funny line, and it’s delivered once, mostly because Vizzini dies shortly thereafter.  Here’s the thing… most of us aren’t Inigo.  We don’t get all the good lines.  I’m here to tell you that when it comes to GMail and it’s beta situation, all the good jokes and good points have already been said.

When you continue to repeat the Inigo lines here in your all too clever comments that Google’s usage of beta doesn’t mean what they think it means, you run the risk of looking more like Vizzini, endlessly repeating the same line.

Essentially, you’ve set up the situation for me to be the Inigo.

My name is Inigo Montoya. You beat a dead horse. Prepare to die.

Goodbye, Meme.  We’ll Miss You.
Predictably, due to the embargoed news that select publications got today as well as the subsequent blog post on the official GMail blog, Google Mail is now plastered all over the pages of almost all tech blogs.

It’s not clear exactly what has changed that put GMail and Apps over the top that allows it to be “production” instead of “beta.”  That information wasn’t included in Google’s release on the topic. Google told Slate last time around that “there lacked some crucial checkmarks” on the internal checklist the GMail team had for the service.

Since that was said, here are the features that were added:

• Import your mail and contacts from other accounts
• New in Labs: Automatic message translation
• New in Labs: Inbox preview
• New fields for Gmail contacts and better importing too
• Labels: drag and drop, hiding, and more

Were these the crucial pieces?  Just like why it’s been considered ‘beta’ for so very long, we may never know.

Does This Actually Change Anything?
Probably not.  Gmail is pretty stable, and it’s been stable for a long time.  Google will continue to roll out features for it regularly. The slow adoption curve will gradually increase by the enterprise.

Perhaps most importantly, every ninth Friday, tech bloggers will need to find something different to be irate over.