Google gears,
is it the right decision?
Many journalists and commentators have tried to point out that the arrival of Google gears could spell the beginning of the end for Microsoft and other application developers. We think about it differently.
It’s a venerable effort, trying to develop a web application that can run off-line, customers could work on web application documents away from the office, on the plane for example. But what about applications with complex needs, that deal with massive amounts of data? Does the browser really have the stability and extensibility to cater for these products?
People using Google gears will obviously miss things that would be on their corporate networks/websites, after all, how will the applications developed with these technologies know about which documents users are going to need?
One solution is to get the user to tell the web application that they’re going offline soon and they’ll need x, y & z documents for editing on the plane.
But this solution is flawed because it makes a foolish assumption… it assumes that the user’s situation won’t change. What is the user forgets all the documents they need? And what if the user doesn’t exactly know what documents they need? Or the user gets a call seconds before take-off saying that the company needs a document about x in 6 hours time?
This are the kind of scenarios we’re thinking about addressing with Flow. Making sure all computers are synced with the same data. Now that hard disk space is getting cheaper, we can attempt duplication of server documents to designated client machines in the event of the user needing the informaiton quicker.
We need to think hard about security though, but with the latest forms of encryption and future developments to come with quantum encryption, this idea could be conceived.
Google gears is a great first step in the direction of working offline seemlessly but it’s by no means perfect and questions about the amount of data a Google gears application can store remain to be seen.