Google’s latest offering, Google Gears, is making quite the buzz, and deservedly so. Much of the talk is centered around the technology itself. Google Gears is an open sourced framework for creating off-line web applications. Basically, it is a plug-in to web browsers which will allow the sharing and storing of local and remote data. You could create a text document in your web browser, and it will save on your computer and on the internet, at Google Docs for example. Now, you may be saying “big deal”, well it is a big deal. Before this, if you were to create a document at Google Docs and have your internet connection die before you saved your data, you could lose your data. With Google Gears, your document can be stored locally and be shared automatically with Google Docs.

Google Gears manages to offer this feature by a combination of javascript, a local database, and other technology. What you create in the browser can be stored automatically in the database. Now, the example of Google Docs isn’t implemented yet, it was only an example. However, you get the idea of what the technology offers. Since it is open source, we can expect plenty of people to start developing for it.

You may still be saying “big deal!”. Now comes the area that Google is downplaying. Since so many people that have bought and use Microsoft’s cash cow only use the more basic features, they may finally figure out that they don’t need to pay hundreds of dollars for something that they can get for free. Not only is it free, it has the intrinsic ability to provide a local copy of your files and one available over the internet from anywhere in the world. This ability to have an automatic back-up of your files available from anywhere in the world with internet access can’t be stressed enough. If people finally figure this out and start making the switch, we may see a dramatic drop in the price of Microsoft Office.

Google Gears is available for Firefox 1.5+ and IE6+. It is still and early beta, and doesn’t offer too many uses yet. We will see if the web responds by taking this technology and running with it.

Source: ZDNet Blog