For the past few years, many webmail users around the world have collectively agreed that Gmail is one of Google’s greatest application creations next to search. It has often been wondered why so many highly ranked Google applications like it seem to be perpetually in beta form.

The free webmail service was launched on April Fool’s Day 2004 and was marked as “beta invite-only” until February 2007. As of today, it houses over 100 million accounts, but the bigger news of the day is that the entire Google Apps suite has finally come out of its beta shell and are now recognized as a prime time applications.

Matthew Glotzbach, Director, Product Management at Google recently posted a blog stating that “’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. Indeed, today we're also announcing some other Google Apps features that we think will appeal to large enterprises: mail delegation, mail retention and ongoing enhancements to Apps reliability."