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In the tech world, that single word - Beta - suggests that a product is still undergoing tests and not quite ready for prime time. In most cases, beta periods can last a few weeks or a few months until the final release version is available.

Today, five years after its release, Google’s Gmail has officially shed the Beta label, along with a handful of other Google Apps. For the users, it won’t mean much. Gmail and the other apps will look the same and work the same.

But for Google, the dumping of the label is the equivalent of unlocking the gates to the enterprise, a move that should “remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite,” the company said. From the official Google blog post:

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.

It’s a move that’s long overdue. If Google wants to try to steal some market share from Microsoft by luring enterprise customers to its cloud-based Apps - which includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk - it needed to remove that label.

In some ways, I understand why Google left the label on for so long. At a meeting with the Google Apps team last year, the folks there told me that they are constantly innovating their products and that they don’t believe in releasing new versions, such as the way Microsoft has done every year or two with its software suite. Instead, Google launches a product - in beta - and then continually tweaks it, sometimes by launching a feature in Google Labs and other times by just flipping the switch on something new.