When Google first released the 0.1 version of their Gears browser plug-in back in May 2007, I thought for sure it would be only a matter of a few months before we saw web applications taking full advantage of an offline mode, maybe a year at max. I think I may have grossly underestimated just how long the project would take to gain adoption, both from Google’s own applications as well as the rest of the Internet.
But even though adoption has been slow, more and more applications are gradually getting Gears treatments.
Today Google announced that Gmail can now be taken offline with Google Gears, meaning that you can now read and reply to your Gmail messages while you’re disconnected from the interweb, and have all of the email synchronize when you’re back online again. There are still some bits of functionality that aren’t available in an offline mode – like the calendar, for example – but it’s a great start and about time.
Google Reader has offered offline support through Gears for some time now, and so has Google Docs. Wordpress, although not an application developed by Google, has featured gears support for some time now.
It’s exciting to see so many powerful and rich applications available for offline use with Gears. This could be one of those little things that Microsoft hears about and gets them a little bit nervous about the long-term future. It’s probably far too early to make predictions about how much further web applications will go in replacing traditional desktop applications – and certainly there will always be some applications that will probably never be practical as web applications, like Adobe Photoshop for example. But traditional “knowledge worker” applications – office productivity applications – seem like prime targets to be replaced by rich web applications. Reliable and usable offline versions will likely accelerate the pace of innovation in these types of applications, as having an offline version will likely speed up end user adoption. In other words, I think we’re hitting an inflection point where Google may consider a heavier investment in engineering and development of these tools. Plus, Microsoft is planning a full web interface of their Office suite with the Office 14 release. This could be the start of a new software war: the offline office suite war.
But I could be wrong. As I said, I overestimated how quickly Gears would be adopted in the first place. So we’ll see, I suppose. My money is on Google for now, though.
