In February 2001 Google acquired Deja.com and promptly renamed it Google Groups. It’s been in Beta ever since.It had a much overdue upgrade last year to Google Groups 2 (although I have noticed that Google have now dropped the ‘2′) with some significant improvements in usability and speed over the original version, and has moved beyond just Usenet newsgroups, but for me the interface is still clunky and the layout is not easy to understand. Google’s approach to using Beta tags for its product is becoming legendary, but this must be a record for them as it approaches 5 years with that title.
The rapid advance in other Google products suggest that Groups does not have the same development priority as other areas within Google. My guess would be that G consider Usenet not to have the potential to deliver the big $$$. The inability to make any return from Usenet has seen the demise of many companies in this field. There has been a trend for ISP’s to outsource or even abandon offering a news feed to it’s customers with AOL discontinuing its service in February 2005.
As someone who is trying to better what G is doing in the newsgroup area (and specifically with web-interface access), I do admire what they have achieved. Working efficiently with that volume of data is impressive but they have the skills, infrastructure and resources to support it. I still believe I can develop a more intuitive and feature packed interface than Google Groups (in time!), and maybe by the time their product comes out of Beta I might have an offering that can match it on usability 