Over a decade after it was founded and almost five years after it went public, Google is finally ready to seriously take on the competition. Yes, that search thing they have has been pretty successful but they’re ready to move on.

Google made a few big announcements last week. First, they declared that after five years Gmail (and the rest of the Google Apps suite are) no longer in beta. Second, they revealed the Chrome isn’t just going to be a browser, it’s going to be an operating system. There’s also going to be expanded support for OpenID in Google Apps, but this post is going to focus on the first two announcements.

The first announcement is, by Google’s own admission, largely superficial:

We’re often asked why so many Google applications seem to be perpetually in beta. For example, Gmail has worn the beta tag more than five years. We realize this situation puzzles some people, particularly those who subscribe to the traditional definition of “beta” software as not being yet ready for prime time.

Ever since we launched the Google Apps suite for businesses two years ago, it’s had a service level agreement, 24/7 support, and has met or exceeded all the other standards of non-beta software. More than 1.75 million companies around the world run their business on Google Apps, including Google. We’ve come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase. So we’ve focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark.

Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta. “Beta” will be removed from the product logos today, but we’ll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there’s a small “beta” beneath the logo.

We have much more in store, and IT managers can read more about how to make the switch to Apps in our Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes resource centers. One more thing — for those who still like the look of “beta”, we’ve made it easy to re-enable the beta label for Gmail from the Labs tab under Settings.

Yes, that’s the entire Official Google Blog post about the change. Sorry, but it’s sort of remarkable statement and it’s worth quoting the whole thing because what’s interesting here is the message(s) being sent more than the fact of any particular new innovation.

As they explain, the message that they’re trying to send by dropping the beta characterization is that their applications are ready for serious enterprise deployment. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that they want to stop sending the message that the applications aren’t ready for such use.

There’s good reason for Google to approach this in negative terms. It’s not really that something has changed and that today, for the first time, the Apps Suite is at last “ready”. After all, the first day out of beta testing isn’t how they want the product thought of either. Rather Google is making a branding choice.

Being in beta, for Google, doesn’t mean “not ready yet”; they’re pretty clear on this in the first paragraph. Instead it just means “not done yet”. That’s not a negative thing, it mean that the product is going to just keep on getting better. This attitude is actually one of the original defining principles of Web 2.0 as layed out by Tim O’Reilly , way back when Gmail really was still new:

The open source dictum, “release early and release often” in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, “the perpetual beta,” in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It’s no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a “Beta” logo for years at a time.

Google is probably justifiably a bit proud of leading the charge into this radical new future. Embodying the new, more flexible, more innovation-oriented Web 2.0 ethos is a big part of the Google brand. Even Tim O’Reilly expects the “beta” to persist. I don’t think that Google is worried about disappointing him exactly, but they might hesitate a bit to give up their status as the example of the tech buzzword of the decade.

[That's not to discount Flickr and delicious (which, as an aside, dropped the dots since '05 for reasons not totally dissimilar from the reasons Google is dropping the "beta"), but Yahoo! isn't not quite in the same league—not a lot of corporations are deploying Yahoo!-based IT solutions at the moment. (Possibly another punctuation-related issue.)]

Hesitate, but not for too long. Google is already recognized as an innovator and the majority of people who appreciate the little beta under the Gmail logo aren’t going change their opinion of the company or its products too much if that little word goes away. Having it there emphasizing the attitude that set Google apart did, however, serve an important business function for a time. Another paragraph from same O’Reilly section about the perpetual beta:

[A]lmost all web applications have a development cycle that is radically unlike anything from the PC or client-server era. It is for this reason that a recent ZDnet editorial concluded that Microsoft won’t be able to beat Google: “Microsoft’s business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google’s depends on everyone exploring what’s new in their computing environment every day.” (O’Reilly, again)

That sort of press probably helped Google’s share price triple in the first year after its IPO (roughly contemporaneous with the document quoted above), especially with what happened the last time a lot of money got thrown at new Web companies. That’s not to suggest Google’s success was just a bunch of nerdy hype about getting past the traditional software release cycle; the developments I’m writing about (not to mention their dominance of the search market and really brilliant monetization strategies) demonstrate that’s hardly the case. But being the poster child of the Web’s next generation, especially in the eyes of people driving the discussion about the direction of technology, helped Google separate itself from the rocky history of Internet ventures. It also probably made it easier to attract the sort of talent that’s allowed Google to develop such a wide range of very successful products.

But Google is in little danger of being mistaken for another Netscape at this point and seems to get by in terms of finding people to work for them (sometimes they lose them though, but that’s another post). They’re dropping the “beta” not because the products are ready, but because the company is ready. They no longer need to remind people that they role out new features faster than bloggers can even keep up with them. It’s time for Google to start worrying about “some people” who are “puzzled” by the perpetual beta concept and who “subscribe to the traditional definition” of the term, those “large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phrase.”

It’s this language that’s the really interesting (if subtle and less consequential) message that Google’s sending. They’re acknowledging that they’re selling out. It’s as if this blog post is trying to soften the blow to those who are with Google on the perpetual beta attitude. They’ve grown up and have to wear a tie and are telling their hip Valley friends that they realize it’s just to make executives feel more comfortable but that they’ve gotta do what they’ve gotta do. That might sound like reading a bit to far into it, but the fact that they’ve included a settings option to reverse this minor change “for those who still like the look of ‘beta’” seems to suggest they do take this image issue fairly seriously. Even if you think that feature is sort of tongue-in-cheek it’s still for the benefit of their fans rather than their customers.

The contrast in tone with between this announcement and their other one is stark. Here it’s quite and (I think) almost apologetic to part of their constituency. It’s also narrowly targeted: The last paragraph address those who might want their “beta” back in the logo and IT managers. The second announcement, on the other hand, feels much bolder, is about a much broader consumer market, and concerns much more than just a name change

It’s actually the opposite—same name, new product. Sort of, at least. Again, I’ll just let the Official Google Blog post explain:

It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

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. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Microsoft does a Google impression with Bing, Google does a Microsoft impression by trying to tie Web browser and OS together (which Microsoft went through a lot of legal trouble for back when Google was just a search engine). But it probably is true that it’s time to rethink the paradigm in which Internet Explorer was merely one application among many that Microsoft was trying to unfairly bundle with Windows. Back then the Web was mainly a network of documents that one could browse— hence “browser”. Now it’s possible to just about anything in the browser: write and share documents, make spreadsheets, edit images, email, chat, manage contacts, publish and consume content in all sorts of new ways, even write code and manage network infrastructures. What other applications do you need?

The dramatic part of the announcement is Google’s assessment of the landscape that the Chrome OS will be introduced into:

We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.

That’s some rough talk. Google is criticizing existing popular operating systems—not just Windows but Mac OS X too (significant in part because of the recent kerfuffle over Google CEO Eric Schmidt sitting on Apple’s board)—pretty harshly. The alternative being presented is a world where the consumer (and potentially even enterprise?) computing experience has shifted to the cloud. Files aren’t saved to a hard drive, but to a data center.

And here’s where these two developments from last week converge. If Google expects users to give up the familiarity of saving Word files to the desktop then they’d better make sure that the alternative on offer inspires confidence. No doubt the alpha geeks likely to begrudge Google the decision to give up the perpetual beta will be able to deal with this shift in perspective. Indeed, any long time user of Gmail has probably already become comfortable placing a fair amount of trust in Google’s infrastructure. But for many, many users the idea that their data is primarily somewhere “out there” rather than safely ensconced in the material of their computer is more than a little disconcerting.

But is Google even targeting the unadventurous user with Chrome OS? Maybe it’s only the early adopters that they are after. If only so many people are willing to switch away from their default browser to go with the Chrome browser, how many would be willing to do so for their whole operating system?

It’s hard to see the sense in that. As with Android, it might start off as something for the significantly tech-savvy, but that’s only stage one. If Google is looking to grow that 1.75 million enterprise Google Apps users and if the Chrome OS is in part about providing a simple, thin, specifically designed portal to access Web applications like Google’s, then it seems like somewhere beyond the horizon there must be a notion of enterprise Google Chrome OS deployment.

That’s not all, of course. Google is jumping on the new “netbook” market and probably thinks that inexpensive consumer Linux machines might finally grab some market share if they were branded Google instead of Ubuntu or something else nerdy and frightening. But it’s the idea that Google could take on traditional players, particularly Microsoft, in the corporate environment that is really intriguing. It might sound unlikely, but the fact that Microsoft is making its own move towards the could suggests that the terrain is shifting enough to make such a thing possible. That story, and much more, in a soon-to-come part 2…