Google Gears up for app dominance

I've long advocated the concept of software as a service. This idea - often referred to as the application service provider (ASP) model - was first hyped up during the dotcom boom days of the late 90s but it has not really taken off in a big way yet.

What it means is that your applications (like word processor, spreadsheet, image editor, etc…) don't reside locally on your hard drive but are actually delivered to you via the Internet from a remote server.

The advantages of this approach are plentiful. By having these apps online, you can access them anywhere there's an Internet connection. For example, let's say you are working on your resume from your home PC using an ASP word processor. You could be in a cybercafé or a friend's office and can retrieve that document right there and then through the Internet.

The other obvious advantage is that because the software is online, you'll never have to bother with upgrades. They will be upgraded automatically on the server side. You also need not worry about viruses or spyware. All these will be taken care of by the service provider.

Lastly, there is also cost savings. Software suites can be very expensive but they might not be fully utilized by certain staff members. With ASP models, the applications can be made available on a pay-as-you go or monthly rental fee. This means no big upfront cost but progressive payments based on your needs.

There is one big downside to the ASP model though, and that's the lack of "persistence". Precisely because it's available online, it's not accessible when there is no Internet connection. Sometimes, you need to be able to do work offline but it's not possible with ASP apps.

That's all about to change with the introduction of Google Gears, an open-source multi-platform JavaScript Application Programming Interface that creates a local cache on your hard drive to facilitate offline access to ASP applications.

If the above description sounds like Russian to you, let me paraphrase it in layman's terms. Google Gears is a tool that allows web apps to work offline. That's right. By using this tool, web application service developers can now make it possible for those very apps to work even when there is no Internet access.

This is a critical important component that removes the Achilles' heel of ASP software.

Everyone – even Microsoft, the king of desktop software – acknowledges that applications are increasing moving online and. It's the wave of the future. But Internet access is hardly ubiquitous even in the West or even in South Korea, the country with the highest broadband penetration rate in the world.

There are gaps in connectivity and there will simply be times and situations when you have no access to the Internet but still need to do some work. If all your apps are online, you are stuck.

And even when you can get online, there will be times when the Internet access is slow. The way web-based applications work is that when you enter data it has to make a round trip to the server and back. So, when connection is slow, the app will work slowly.

This even happens when you have broadband. Although I often use Microsoft Word, I also use Google Docs. It's especially useful for my "To Do" list which I want to be able to access from any computer with Internet access. I find that it does take longer to save documents on Google Docs than MS Word. Google Gears should change that as changes to the document will be saved locally on your hard drive and automatically synced to the server in the background through the Internet.

To achieve broad reach, Google is offering Gears for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari (Apple's browser) and to make its code open source so that it can be improved by a global community of developers and vendors. And yes, there is support for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

Will this development threaten Microsoft's dominance in software? Not immediately. Microsoft still makes some very good software which nobody else, offline or online, has yet to effectively challenge. Google Docs, for example, is not nearly as good as MS Word. Google Spreadsheet is also not as good as Excel.

But they're slowly getting there and if Microsoft doesn't start making its apps available online as well as offline, it may soon find Google eating its lunch in the software business, particularly office productivity software.