Google at its Developer Day event today unveiled a new user plugin and developer’s toolkit of javascript APIs called Gears
that acts as a platform for supporting online applications in an
offline mode. Features suddenly available to the browser include local
file storage and caching, a client-side SQL
database, and asynchronous background processes – this last being
crucial to prevent the entire browser from freezing up under load
during an on-demand session.
These are early days, Gears
is still in beta, but the release has opened a world of discussion,
reigniting the speculation that Google’s on-demand Office-like
applications really are aimed at taking Microsoft’s enormous user base.
The view is larger than this however. Microsoft itself is no longer committed to the desktop.
The software developer now views applications and user needs as
switching back and forth between the desktop and the cloud
effortlessly, at need.
Ray Ozzie has made it very clear how the company thinks and how it’s developing for the future.
The
importance of Google’s move lies in what it does for the on-demand
industry: bringing the online functionality offline to the desktop was
the next step SaS needed. Google has taken the lead in three key ways
here: first by creating the toolkit of course; second by offering its
development as open source; third by approaching the Web Hypertext
Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) to introduce Google Gears
as a standard.
Adobe Systems found in the GEARS project great similarity with its own recently released offline SDK, the Apollo
runtime, and the company has teamed with Google to ensure integration
between both platforms. Both developments are using SQLite for the
local database, and the companies are aligning their efforts on such
things as synchronous and asynchronous calls.
What kind of
impact these developments will make on enterprise IT is an open
question. The landscape has been changing around small businesses and
the fringe of the enterprise, with the rise of on-demand computing and
Web 2.0 tools, and Gears and Apollo fulfill a critical need in this
continued evolution.
“the complexion of the Office marketplace (and the
application marketplace in general) is poised for a sea change. Given
Google’s approach to application delivery and business models,
companies such as Microsoft may have their hands forced in terms of
reconsidering everything from the architecture behind their existing
solutions portfolios to the licensing costs for those solutions.- Google Gears vies to be de facto tech for offline Web apps
But given Microsoft’s own contributions to business intelligence and services integration,
the concept of Google and Microsoft competing to destroy each other is
probably too narrow, a zero-sum picture in a win-win area.
Even though Microsoft likes to talk about its DNA
requiring it eventually to dominate any space it plays in, the company
itself may actually not be big enough for what is now a vastly
increased task. Probably this idea of narrow-focus competition should
evolve into the notion that Google and Microsoft are simply two big
players out of several (including for example SAP, Oracle, Cisco, IBM, and many more) in an astronomically expanding network.
Competition
for the global customer base continues of course. The undoubted rapid
evolution and wide deployment of Google Gears and its descendants will
offer continued empowerment to smallish businesses and fringe units,
which in turn will provide a laboratory for a lot of migration
development.
If business people, for example, could migrate all their legacy Excel spreadsheets
to the cloud, out of MS, and into business intelligence applications
offered on-demand, this could represent a potential loss for Microsoft.
This is starting to happen with Outlook legacy files migrating to gmail, but it’s not perfect yet, and spreadsheet migration will have to be perfect.
