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.

[tags]Web 2.0, offline, thin clients, thick clients, Google, Google Gears, FeedDemon, Outlook[/tags]

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