Christian Cantrell posted today about MSN's entry into the "Beta Game." This brought up something that I've been thinking about the last few days... what exactly are the timeframes for all of these beta applications to actually go into "final" release mode?

For example - I'm currently using GMail (for my listservs, I use Thunderbird for my main mail), MS Antispyware, and other applications that are in beta. It makes me wonder when these applications will ever hit 1.0 - especially GMail. I would say GMail is pretty darn good now (except for the silly lack of ability to delete an entire folder).