Beta Test

Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

What's with Google and beta tests? A beta-test is supposed to be a short lived stage in between a product going live and it being declared sound enough to be offered to the general public. But four years after launch, with tens of millions of users, Gmail is still in beta (as are any number of other Google products). Surely, by now the bugs must be ironed out sufficiently so that Gmail can stand tall without having to hide behind the apologetic 'beta' tag?

Then again, perhaps Google's on to something. If their products can be in perpetual beta-test, maybe the rest of us can be too? Imagine, no more berating yourself for the silly mistakes you make. Instead, having made a mistake, fix it or learn from it, and congratulate yourself for ironing out one more bug in the great beta-test called life. After all, if a life in beta is good enough for Google, maybe it should be good enough for the rest of us?

Thinking about it, it could be argued that some religions have long embraced the concept of a life in beta-test. Buddhists, for example, describe nirvana as a state of being in which one is free from both suffering and the cycle of rebirth. In short, you have to live a lot of lives in beta before you're ready to reach your final product stage.

Talking of beta-tests. Welcome to the new look BookBrowse website. It's the result of many, many months of development. We've tested and retested and, we hope, got everything running smoothly, but there's always room for improvement - so if you come across something that doesn't look right or is just plain broken, please let us know!