PC World's Harry McCracken was one of the people who enthused about Google Gears almost a year ago, but he's having second thoughts: see The Frustratingly Unfulfilled Promise of Google Gears. Clearly it hasn't taken off. He writes:
If Google Gears is a bandwagon, in other words, it's one that almost nobody -- including the proprietors of most of Google's own services -- has jumped on yet...
How come? Well, it's clear that even with the advent of tools and platforms such as Gears and Adobe Air, moving online apps into the offline world is just plain hard. No current Gears-enabled app is anything like its full-blooded self in offline form -- and since most of them are stripped-down compared to traditional desktop software even in their online versions, that means the offline ones are barebones at best.
The fact that Google itself hasn't done that much with Gears-enabled applications yet -- at least in any form that it's willing to make public -- is probably the best evidence that doing great stuff with Gears is far from a cakewalk.
I haven't enthused about Google gears because the idea of running a cut-down version of a cut-down online program seems more than somewhat pointless. An offline version of Gmail, for example, is a complete waste of time when you can already run Thunderbird. This handles your Gmail offline, is much more powerful, and free.
Similarly I have zero interest in a Gears-enabled calendar or contacts book. All I want is for Google's online software to sync seamlessly and painlessly with the calendar and contacts book I already use on my PCs and/or mobile phones.
If people were still using dumb terminals then giving them access to their mainframe data offline would be a great boon. That's one reason why personal computer sales started to take off 30 years ago. Gears needs to offer more than a rerun of 1977 to have much appeal today.
