Don’t mind me as I roll around the floor laughing my ass off at this so-called improvement of Web 2.0 applications being able to work offline. This from a movement that proclaim the death of desktop applications and the superiority of web base applications. This from Web 2.0 proponents who were claiming the death of the thick client environment was right around the corner and that browser based applications would inevitably become the standard always on broadband world.
First we had Zoho with their added ability to work on your stuff locally and sync up with their servers when your always on broadband connection was actually working. This was followed by several other companies and now culminating with the announcement of Google Gears.
Of course because it’s from Google it is now the big darling of the tech b’sphere with posts just about everywhere waxing loving about this newest and greatest from the greatest benefactor to mankind.
Am I the only one seeing the irony of all this here?
Sure as Omar Shahine says in his post much of the offline implementations by thick client software was questionable at best; but it is getting better and uses both Outlook and FeedDemon as prime examples of how it is now being done the right way.
So what do we get for this new innovation? - well we get our data once again being stored locally just as with those supposedly antiquated thick clients, we then store that same data on some-one else server and all the security concerns that go along with that and as an added bonus we get the pleasure of working in plain boring user interfaces both locally and remotely.
Sounds like a great step forward to me.
Conversation Tags: Web 2.0, offline, thin clients, thick clients, Google, Google Gears, FeedDemon, Outlook
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One Comment
I agree there is some irony in it. IMHO, it’s really a browser issue since browsers will only save 2k or so of data in a cookie. In the browser wars, I’m amazed that IE or Firefox didn’t simply come out with a local data store.
It looks like Google Gears is doing this with Firefox: http://gears.google.com/
IE is trying to do it with Silverlight (for the life of me, I can’t figure out why they just don’t put it in IE and then make plugins for other browsers).
Adobe is doing it with Apollo/Flex.
All of them are really technologies to extend the local data store. I’m not sure that it really classifies it as a ‘desktop engine’… it’s really a browser storage engine that can be used to enable web applications on/offline. I don’t think the purpose is to work without an internet connection. The purpose is to work efficiently with an internet connection.
The innovation is that it’s not browser dependent and operating system dependent. We’re getting closer and closer to seamless integration between any client and a host application. That is pretty exciting!
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[...] Steven Hodson shared the link love with me and pointed to me as being one of the folks who under Google’s magical spell which turns folks into the tech equivalent of gushing teeny boppers at a Justin Wannabake Timberlake concert! Of course because it’s from Google it is now the big darling of the tech b’sphere with posts just about everywhere waxing loving about this newest and greatest from the greatest benefactor to mankind. [...]
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