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technology: The future and what to do about it.

Gears of WarThe new Google product that could augur the death of Microsoft.

By Harry McCracken
Updated Friday, June 15, 2007, at 1:39 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

The influence of Gears and similar programs might even seep into hardware design. A potent Core 2 Duo PC with a couple of gigabytes of RAM and a humongous hard disk is pricey overkill for anyone who mostly works in the browser. Many pundits have mocked Palm's upcoming Foleo, a $500 subnotebooklike gadget that packs just enough hardware oomph to run Linux, some basic office programs, and a Web browser. But it could be a precursor of a class of browser-in-a-book devices that provide all the oomph you need to run IE, Safari, or Firefox.

OK, maybe I'm waxing overly enthusiastic. Before any of these scenarios can happen, these offline services have lots of growing up to do. Remember the Milk is one of only a handful of offline-enabled Web apps; almost all of them are extremely rough drafts. If you try to delete a task in RTM's offline mode, for instance, there's no way to undo your action, as you can when online. Whole swaths of the service, like its address book, aren't available offline.

Then there's Google Reader, the sole Google service that's currently Gears-enabled. It'll download your RSS feeds so you can peruse them without a Net connection. Which is dandy unless any of your feeds are of the sort that only give you a headline, a snippet of text, and a link back to the Web. (Like Slate's feeds, to pick a random example.) Click on one of those links when you're disconnected, and your browser won't be able to find the page.

Given time, the developers behind RTM and Google Reader should be able to re-create more of the services' goodness in offline mode. Realistically, though, you can't completely decouple a great Web-based application from the Web. Flickr is Flickr because it contains petabytes of photos by millions of photographers; Netvibes is Netvibes because it's constantly grabbing content from other sites. Net-less versions of these services would have to downsize their ambitions. Even so, if there were an offline edition of Flickr that, say, allowed me to manage only the pictures on my home network, I'd grab it in a heartbeat.

Long term, of course, cheap, pervasive, reliable broadband would make technologies like Gears superfluous. That day will come; considering the long list of places where I can't even dependably make a voice call, though, I don't think it's arriving all that soon. So, right now, there's unquestionably a need for this stuff. If nothing else, it'll be entertaining to see how old-line software purveyors react. Typically for Google, its spin on Gears is altruistic—the company stresses that it's an open-source product that it hopes many services will embrace. That it's also a way to mess with Microsoft's head may be purely coincidental. But if Google isn't working furiously to bring offline capabilities to everything from Gmail to Google Spreadsheets, I'd be flabbergasted. And bummed out. As a guy who endures more than his share of six-hour plane flights, I can't wait until I can use all my favorite Web services sans Web.

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Harry McCracken is editor in chief of PC World.
Screen shot from Remember the Milk.
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