Google's Gear

I enjoyed this article that James pointed me to as I've played a little with Google Gears inside of Google Reader. For a long time I have been saying Reader would be perfect if it had offline but I've hardly used it since they added it - and I can't quite explain why yet. There are some interesting quotes in this article that help pave the way towards my answer and may point to my legacy of rich client applications:

"While the Gears architecture may be appropriate for page-centric solutions, it's also not clear if it will be successful in addressing the more compound document-oriented, occasionally connected types of work exemplified by products such as Notes and Groove."

"My initial reaction is that 1) people are realizing that offline is valuable, 2) it actually reinforces the point of software and service (not software-as-a-service alone), 3) other vendors [Zimbra] are working on offline, and 4) the open-source effort around Gears will have to carry the day since it appears that Google has left this initially pretty bare-bones," said Mike Gotta, O'Kelly's Burton Group colleague.

"It's a capitulation by Google that Microsoft is right—it's all about SAAS and software, not just SAAS," Creese said. "The important question to ask is, How useful are the APIs? Do they do most of the heavy lifting, or is Google leaving that up to developers? Put another way, can I make several API calls and I'm done, or do I have to make 42 separate calls in an arcane sequence before I'm done?"

Now they may seem to play in to Microsoft's hands so I'm bound to agree but I think there is something in here. One of the things I try to do here at Microsoft is explain our technology in layman's terms as much as possible and it's slightly ironic that Google Gears may end up becoming a good proxy for explaining our Software + Services strategy. I suspect not, but it has me thinking.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 19, 2007
  I think a better term would be Service + software.  Microsofts approach is for the software to do the heavy lifting. Googles is the other way round.

• Anonymous
  June 19, 2007
  offline the best solution to RSS feeds is still (IMO) the Vista RSS platform coupled with something like RikReader (http://11011.net/software/rikreader)

• Anonymous
  June 19, 2007
  For my needs, the Vista RSS platform + IE7's feed reader works great.  I have about 50 feeds in 5 categories so it is quite manageable even with IE7's minimalistic feed reader. Gears is interesting, in the same way that Adobe AIR is interesting, but I really think Microsoft has gone about it in the better way.  Using .NET and XAML to unify the web and desktop development experience is absolutely Microsoft's biggest advantage.  Google's strategy seems to be trying to let the droves of web developers make stand-alone web-apps using the exact same skills they already have (javascript/HTML).  Microsoft is allowing that through the DLR (javascript, Ruby, Python, and even PHP eventually are .NET languages through a DLR implementation) and also providing a better, more unified way on top of that.  And all of that comes together through the Visual Studio/Expression suite of tools which IMO are amazing tools to use.

• Anonymous
  June 19, 2007
  intersting...I should go check RikReader. thanks!