Ryan Baker reminds Google that even they can’t play fast and loose with trust:
That ability is called trust. Google however has damaged their earned trust in somewhat unexpected ways. Maintaining trust isn’t as simple as not breaking your promises, because people aren’t fully rational about trust. Causing confusion is as reliable a mechanism to lose trust as lying, and Google has done a good job of confusing users with their extremely long list of beta products. Sure, they are called beta’s and the implicit statement there is that it’s not complete, but since some of their beta products have had quality far above others, the meaning of beta changed.
This advice applies to any company, and especially companies that don’t have wholesale quantities of trust to spare.