Google Gears up for offline docs, why not Gmail and Calendar?

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 01 April 2008 15:53

Opinion and Analysis

Email and calendars, however, are a different breed. They are actually creatures of the cloud. In the case of Gmail and Google Calendar, if you're offline, you're flying blind and that's just not good enough.

We all know that Google denies that it wishes to compete with Microsoft in the office productivity out of one side of its mouth, while continually upping the ante out of the other. Naturally, appearing to hit Microsoft where it hurts is Word, Excel and Powerpoint. However, the reality right now is that Google is doing the most damage is in the Outlook area. How many Gmail and Google Calendar users are there compared to Google Docs users?

To me, this suggests that the first first priority for Google is to take Gmail and Google Calendar out of the cloud using Google Gears. After that, Google can address the far less pressing issue of documents. In the end most of us see where this is all heading. Eventually, everything will be in the cloud and a subset of that will be attached to our keyring. Right now, we need emails and calendars on our keyrings as much as documents.