Google Unplugged: Why Its Offline Approach Is A Strategic Turning Point (By Thomas Claburn)

Offline's Business BenefitsArizona State University is one of the most aggressive enterprise adopters of Google apps, with more than 40,000 students and faculty using Gmail instead of campus-run e-mail, and a portal to provide access to calendar, and Docs & Spreadsheets. Adrian Sannier, ASU's technology officer, is eager for his team to deploy and develop using Google's online-offline framework, but he sees the risk for Google to mess up what makes the apps so appealing. Google's strength is making a light, browser-based client that makes adoption and upgrades easy, he says. "Depending on how heavy the offline client starts to become, that has the potential to dilute Google's advantage."
Prudential Preferred Properties CRE, a real estate firm affiliated with Prudential Financial, has about 80 employees using Gmail and Google Calendar. Offline access to Web apps hasn't been a high priority there; network uptime is so critical to doing business, if the network goes down, there are more serious problems than whether the calendar is available, IT director Cameron Daily says. Still, Daily would like to give agents on-the-go access to their Gmail archives and Calendar when they're not online. Aung Zayar Lwin, head of IT at building consultancy Drew George & Partners, sees similar potential for offline mail and calendar. Neither Daily nor Lwin sees Google Gears as any reason to stop using Microsoft Office. Prudential just bought new Office licenses, and Lwin expects Drew George eventually to deploy Office 2007. Offline access or not, Google Docs & Spreadsheets doesn't stack up on features. The only reason Lwin sees to even experiment with Google Docs & Spreadsheets now is for the online collaboration capability.
Google's not offering much help for IT planning. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is an obvious candidate for offline use, but it's not saying when it might offer offline options. Huber notes that apps from companies other than Google may be the most important uses for Gears, since the APIs can be used to develop any browser-based application for PCs or mobile phones.
Google expected about 5,000 developers across 10 cities worldwide for its Developer Day. In Beijing, about 800 programmers shook off the drizzling weather to attend one of two tracks, one for the Google product development platform and the other for Linux and open source. They heard Shiva Shivakumar, founder and director of Google's Seattle R&D Center, praise Chinese developers for their skills and potential to "develop world-class products." Zhou Jiahao, an R&D manager with a company that provides local mobile search, came away interested in using the improved map mashup features Google announced.
Compared with Microsoft's developer community, which includes more than a million professionals using Visual Studio 2005, Google's community doesn't seem like much--yet.
The measure of Google's success in attracting developers will be in whether they help move the company beyond being a Getting online apps to run well offline is certainly good for Internet users. Google's theory is that helping people unplug those apps will make the company all the more indispensible when they log back on.
-- with J. Nicholas Hoover, Richard Martin, and Ding Yaling of InformationWeek China
Google acknowledged last week that, sometimes, people aren't connected to the Internet. It was a strategic turning point for the Web's highest-flying company.
At Google's first Developer Day, the company introduced free, Nonetheless, Google Gears makes browser-based apps more of a threat to Microsoft's business model of getting people to pay for software. Google is first applying it only to its Reader, which checks a person's favorite Web sites and stores updates. Google's mail, calendar, and Docs & Spreadsheets applications are likely next candidates. And any developer can use the platform to offline-enable their apps. By opening up more ways for developers to build on Google data and infrastructure, the company's making it easier for others to tap into the source of its wealth--the half a billion people who visit Google's network of sites every month.
But Google's offline approach also is a recognition that Microsoft's right in insisting that not all computing will take place in the Internet cloud. Microsoft's been touting a vision of "software plus services" that relies on Internet-connected desktop apps, and more enterprise software-as-a-service companies, such as CRM vendor RightNow, recognize the need for some client software.
Google's get-together last week shows it's paying more attention to developers. Google presented its vision of software development by piling TV-sized blocks, painted in Google red, yellow, green, and blue, on the conference stage. If that's too subtle, the keynote address was titled "Building blocks for better Web applications." In addition to Gears, it introduced Mashup Editor for creating map mashups with less than 10 lines of code and Mapplets for combining Maps and Google Gadgets, and it updated its Web developer toolkit, which lets coders write Ajax apps in Java and translate them into browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.
View the Image Gallery:Google Developer's DayGoogle's pitch is that it takes a lot less code to engage and amass an online audience than it does to craft a standalone desktop app. And that audience can be substantial--like the 6.7 million pages views that the creator of the PacMan widget, which can be installed on iGoogle pages, got last week. "By being able to leverage these building blocks, you're able to create amazing applications in probably a tenth the time it would have taken you previously," says Jeff Huber, Google's VP of engineering.
Gears is typical of how Google's trying to build a developer ecosystem with APIs. The growing portfolio includes APIs for Maps, Ajax Search and Ajax Feed, AdWords and AdSense, Google Base Data, GData, and Google Calendar Data. These schemes for accessing Google data and services help developers help themselves while making computing without Google increasingly awkward. Google hopes Gears will become the standard for adding offline capabilities such as data storage, application caching, and multithreading to online applications.
Kevin Lynch, chief software architect at Adobe, welcomed the addition of "a standard cross-platform, cross-browser local storage capability" and said the Gears API would work with Apollo, Adobe's new Web application development platform. Yet Gears could weaken the case for rich apps that exist outside the browser, says Gartner analyst David Mitchell Smith. "Rich clients become less compelling the more the Web applications continue to grow," says Smith.