I'm a bit too young to truly appreciate the difference between Beta and VHS, the two competing video cassette technologies of the late 70's.  Luckily, we live in the Internet Age and lack of information is a complete non-issue: Whitepaper - "Decline and Fall of Betamax."  A lot of people considered Beta to be the better technology, but it simply didn't catch on as quickly as VHS. 

Of course, it would be a play on words for me to correlate Sony's Beta with the "beta" version of a product release.  However, in the instance of Google, I see some similarities.  Have you really spent some time trying to use a lot of the products that Google makes available prematurely?  Granted, most of these products hide behind the "beta" label for a long time (how long is an acceptable amount of time to remain in "beta mode" before Q/A is complete and a public release is scheduled?), but perhaps Google should keep these things to themselves longer before posting them up on the Web.  Try Google Spreadsheets, which doesn't even stack up to Microsoft Excel 1997.  Or, perhaps you'd like to try Google Talk, which pales in comparison with Yahoo Messenger, Skype, MSN, and AOL's AIM Triton.  Of course there's Gmail, which rarely makes up for more than 5% of a marketer's B-to-C list.  Google Video was a nice try, but Apple's iTunes has far surpassed it.  I realize that Google has a lot of talented and creative people, and I appreciate their ambition in trying to develop anything and everything that anybody else can do, but everything always seems to be unfinished and disjointed.  Their beta products have the adoption of the Beta product.

I have had the opportunity to speak with the Founder and CEO of an extremely successful software giant on a few occasions.  He once explained to me that their product development philosophy was governed by three imaginary "dials:"  one controlled the quality of each release, one controlled the speed of each release, and one controlled the number of features in each release.  If one dial was cranked up to a higher level, then another dial would have to be turned down in order to remain within the capacity of their development team.  Every software company has the ability to turn these dials however they wish, and his company chose to turn up the Quality Dial as high as it could go, leaving the Speed Dial in second place and the Features Dial as the lowest priority.  Their company benefited greatly from this decision, and it seems that every software provider who also prioritizes their imaginary dials in the same order tends to prosper.  Quality fuels customer satisfaction and adoption, and it keeps client services costs low.  Speed fuels sales and marketing messaging, and it keeps the company in the news.  Features, while more exciting for developers and technologists, don't always translate into ROI for the customer.  A ton of beta-quality bells and whistles can't compete with a few proven A-level features.

So, Google continues to try to be a jack of all trades.  Quantity seems to rule over quality for them.  They might be making a lot on their shares of stock, but I'll continue to happily use my Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and other competing products until they can catch up.