Kavinda Munasinghe’s Blog

Google shifted gears to venture a little deeper into the desktop by launching Google Gears(Beta), an exciting and new open source project that will bring offline capabilities to web applications via a browser extension. Google Reader was the first to put this new technology into use with an offline mode.

“Google Gears builds on the web’s existing programming model by introducing new JavaScript APIs for sophisticated data storage, application caching, and multi-threading features. With these APIs, developers can bring offline capabilities to even their most complex web applications. Google Gears works with all major browsers on all major platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux.” - Google Press Center

Google Docs and Gmail seem to be the other obvious candidates to enable offline capabilities. This also means a “Google Office” product could be just around the corner. However, even if there eventually is such a product I don’t think its going to compete with the likes of MS Office but instead cater to a different section of end users with different needs.