Technology news and Jobs arrow Our Blogs arrow The BeerFiles arrow Google Gears up for offline docs, why not Gmail and Calendar?
Google Gears up for offline docs, why not Gmail and Calendar? E-mail
by Stan Beer   
Tuesday, 01 April 2008
This is all very interesting. Google Gears now enables users to take Google Docs documents out of the cloud and save them locally for later offline use and we're promised Spreadsheets are next. That's great but hello Google what are your two most widely used cloud applications right now and why have they been ignored!

I don't know about other users but as a long time user who travels the world needing to use a computer, the two most pressing applications I need to have access to are my emails and my diary. Sure, I also need my documents but heck I can save those on a keyring USB stick and right now - pardon me for saying this - but Google Docs and Spreadsheets are still a fair way behind Word and Excel as far as functionality goes.

Without doubt, at least in my mind, Google Docs and Spreadsheets - or some other online equivalent - are the way of the future. However, right here and now, there are a plethora of users like me who have already dropped the likes of Outlook for Gmail and Google Calendars and we're the ones who really need Google Gears support first and foremost.

Imagine the scenario: you're on a plane for 10 hours or so and after watching a movie or two you decide to do a little work so you get out your notebook. You can get to your Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations - they're all saved on your hard drive (or USB stick). However, what about those 200 or so emails you didn't have time to check?

And what is my first week's schedule after I land again? Who's that guy meeting me at the airport? What's his cell number? I know I could have this written on paper but what the hell do I have a laptop for anyway?

The point is that Google Gears is great. The ideas behind it are sound. It's a winner but everything seems be getting done in the wrong order - the priorities are jumbled.

Right now, everyone can take their docs and spreadsheets on the road quite easily. Yes the collaboration and synching part of it is much better in the cloud but in the main there's no real problem offline because these are desktop applications born and bred in the offline world.



 
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