The Frustratingly Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears

Back on May 30th of last year, Google released Google Gears, a browser plug-in designed to help Web-based applications work even when they couldn't connect to the Internet. I was pretty jazzed up about it, and so were my PCW colleagues: We eventually named Gears as the most innovative product of 2007.

I still think that Gears is a fabulous idea. But I'm beginning to worry about its viability. Even though Google's release last week of a test version of its Google Docs online suite that lets you do word processing offline is a major moment in the life of Gears.

The first time I blogged about Gears was a few days after it appeared. I was excited about the new Gears-enabled version of the nifty Australian to-do list Remember the Milk. (At the time, it made up half of the library of Gears-ized applications, the other one being Google's own Google Reader.) I thought the fact that the RTM folks were able to put together an offline version so quickly, and thought it was evidence that lots of other folks would soon follow its lead.

Boy, was I wrong. There are still only a handful of Gears-powered offline services available, including Zoho Writer (which beat Google Docs to the punch with offline Web-based word processing) and a very primitive tool from Google for posting blog items to Blogger. And now Google Docs--which, as my colleague Ed Albro explained in his hands-on look, is promising but an exceptionally rough draft. A month ago, Google rolled out a Windows Mobile version of Gears that brings the basic idea to cell phones:

If Google Gears is a bandwagon, in other words, it's one that almost nobody--including the proprietors of most of Google's own services--has jumped on yet...

How come? Well, it's clear that even with the advent of tools and platforms such as Gears and Adobe Air, moving online apps into the offline world is just plain hard. No current Gears-enabled app is anything like its full-blooded self in offline form--and since most of them are stripped-down compared to traditional desktop software even in their online versions, that means the offline ones are barebones at best.

The fact that Google itself hasn't done that much with Gears-enabled applications yet--at least in any form that it's willing to make public--is probably the best evidence that doing great stuff with Gears is far from a cakewalk. It's true that Google sometimes releases neat ideas and then fails to do much with them (say, whatever happened to Google Base?). But Google is clearly pretty serious about Google Docs (and Google Apps, which rolls in Gmail and other applications). And full-fledged offline functionality would be such a major step forward for Docs and Apps that you gotta think that Google will make it happen if it can.

As for Web developers other than Google, I'm not sure whether they're struggling with Gears, or whether there's simply less interest in offline apps than I hoped and guessed there would be. And the chance remains that some good ones are in the works right now. (One of the problems with Gears is that there doesn't seem to be a good repository of information about existing apps that use it--if Google tells you about all of them when you download and install Gears itself, I've missed that info.)

Maybe I'm just being inappropriately impatient--there are certainly other examples of late-blooming ideas in technology that eventually became roaring successes. (One good one: Firefox, which didn't explode until six years after the Mozilla project got launched.) But I'd love to see some real evidence that Gears is not just a good idea but one that will make the world a better place, and the only evidence that really matters will be an array of well-done Gears apps.

Of course, with broadband on airplanes getting real, the other possibility is that it won't be that long until we're always online. In which case, Gears might turn out to have been a clever stopgap that didn't gain momentum while we still needed it...