Why is Google Not Deploying Gears Aggressively?
We recently had the opportunity to meet with two senior executives at Google. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, ReadWriteWeb editor Richard MacManus and I met with Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise. Then a few weeks later, I met with Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, via video conference. Both meetings provided some interesting background - but the one question that keeps returning and that was not so well answered is: why is Google not deploying Gears aggressively?
What Is Gears?
As explained on Google's FAQ:
"Gears is an open-source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:
- A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server;
- A database, to store and access data from within the browser;
- A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background."
That is important. The biggest single hurdle to mass adoption of web-based office software is the inability to use it when online access is not possible (in airplanes and other fun places off the grid). Offline access is also reassuring for those times when the cloud platform is having trouble: at least you can work offline for a while. This is not a small feature. It is the big one.
We get the usual beta warnings from Google:
"Gears is currently a beta product; moreover, it is currently considered to be a developer-only release. When the developer community has had a chance to examine, critique, and improve Gears, a final version suitable for use with production applications will be made available."
But we learn to ignore these beta designations from Google. Gmail still says beta.
But in this case, Google really is being shy about fully bringing Gears to its own product line-up.
Zoho Is Using Gears. Why Not Google Apps?
Zoho started using Gears in Writer as early as August 2007, nearly 18 months ago. In October 2008, Zoho Mail went offline with Gears.
On March 31st, 2008, Google announced Gears for Docs. This was a step forward, albeit 8 months after its competition (Zoho) did it.
So, the big question is, "When will Gmail enable offline use via Gears?" I posed this question to Dave Grirouard, President of Google Enterprise. The response was along the lines of, making it work on the scale of Gmail is not a trivial engineering challenge. That sort of made sense. But Gears has been out for a long time; it is a critical feature, and Google has the best software engineering talent on the planet.
Ahem, What About Chrome?
Again, from Google's FAQ:
"Gears works on the following browsers:
- Apple Mac OS X (10.4 or higher)
- Firefox 1.5 or higher
- Safari 3.1.1 or higher (requires OS X Tiger 10.4.11+ or Leopard 10.5.3+)
- Linux (Requirements)
- Firefox 1.5 or higher
- Microsoft Windows (XP or higher)
- Firefox 1.5 or higher
- Internet Explorer 6 or higher
- Microsoft Windows Mobile (5 or higher)
- Internet Explorer 4.01 or higher
- The following devices are not supported
- Samsung i320 and i320N
- Orange SPV C600
- Motorola Q
Additionally, the team is working on supporting Safari on Mac OS X in a future release."
Notice the elephant not in the room? Yes, Gears does not work on Chrome. Is that because Chrome does not support extensions?
Is Google holding up Gears until Chrome can support Gears? We hope not. That seems contrary to its philosophy to date, which has been to couple them very loosely. So that is probably just coincidence.
Editor's update: we obviously got the above section totally wrong, so it's been struck out. Apologies for that error, but thanks to our commenters for quickly pointing it out!
"Gears for Mobile Is the Holy Grail"
I had a fascinating talk with Vic Gundotra (VP of Engineering) and Sumit Agarwal (Mobile Product Management). They laid out a mobile strategy that clearly shows that Google is thinking bigger and deeper than anyone else about the future of this huge market. They were also frank about the scale of the engineering challenge. Looking globally, there is no dominant mobile device. In fact, it is an extremely fragmented market. That is a problem when each user expects a native interface.
Vic Gundotra described how about a year ago Google bet that the mobile browser would be the unifying force. Specifically, the strategy was to standardize on Webkit-based browsers. That makes sense but still leaves out the all-important offline access question. So, I posed the "What about Gears?" question. I was told that Gears in a mobile browser was, of course, the "holy grail."
The Answer Given Is Probably Correct
Google is confirming that Gears is critically important to both its web apps and its mobile strategy, and that the delay is simply because deploying Gears on the scale that Google operates is a tough engineering challenge. That seems like the best explanation. But we would love to hear from our readers. Have you used Zoho Mail with Gears, and did it work well? Is it simply a scale issue that is delaying Google's more aggressive deployment of Gears?
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Gears is built into Chrome, so that question is a non-issue.
Um. Gears is built into Chrome. The article doesn't make any sense :)
Posted by: Dion Almaer
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December 2, 2008 8:22 AM
Yeah take a look under the Options Menu and look at the Under the Hood tab. Chrome is built with Gears, that's why they don't mention that you can download Gears for Chrome. It would make no sense to download it for Chrome.
LOL! "Gears is bundled with every Chrome install..." [http://bit.ly/yIM4]
Posted by: MikeAmundsen
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December 2, 2008 8:30 AM
Yah, this article makes no sense. Chrome has the ability to put Gears right in there. The Gears guys are even on the Chrome team!
I would update the article :)
Gears on Chrome? Yes, it's always been there. It's built in. Am I missing something, or are you?
lol... I think the 5 people before me have said it all :)
Yup, This article needs to be edited.
Thanks everybody for pointing out my error re Chrome.
i use chrome just for google gears..
Beyond the points above, I think Google's strategy is build a bundle of core self-sufficient dots on the map and then, at the write time, start connecting the dots.
They are still building dots. In a year from now they'll start connecting more obviously. And then in 2 years from now we'll start to see some really cool stuff as Google begins to dominate the way Microsoft did a decade ago.
But, because Google is thinking bigger picture here, the foundation (dots) they will have built will be with an eye on the future whereas Microsoft's eyes seem to be on protecting yesterdays success.
But Gears is bundled into Chr-- oh, wait... the rest of the world already corrected that.
Personally, I think Google should be deploying everything they have more aggressively: Gmail, Docs, Groups, Picasa, Maps, Reader, Chrome, iGoogle, Android, Earth, Sketchup, Sites, etc, etc, etc... But, I suppose that's the problem that Sergey pointed out a while ago. They have too many good/great products to really push any one very hard. Rather than creating more things, and even before making an initiative, maybe they are still attempting to mesh all of them together into a cohesive entity that is mindlessly easy to transition between. As you mentioned, they have huge resources, but their corporate culture doesn't allow for much focusing, IMO.
Gear has been promoted to a first class citizen for Android. Gears' value is off the chart when used in the context of Android apps, so it's not being "aggressively promoted" to let Google have a little exclusivity until it becomes part of the Open Source Android stack.
You can see similar behavior with Android and Flash - until Adobe releases that Open Source version of Flash for mobile they have been working on forever ( !!! ), you'll keep seeing alot of foot dragging.
http://www.openscreenproject.org
Android + Gears + Open Screen Project ( all released under the Apchache license ) = off the chart WIN
Regarding Gears on Linux, there's no 64 bit version of it. In other words, it only works on old setups.
I'm not even sure there's a Win64 version either.
The people at Google who do all the work like tinkering just so much better than marketing. Google has created an engineering environment and they are now bitten by a lack of marketing talent.
Bundling Gears with Chrome make sense, though. Web Apps are most useful for people who don't want or can't install and maintain software. Therefore Gears must be almost invisible or otherwise their target demographic won't be able to use it.
Reason why Gears hasn't proliferated is that its functionality requires server side (web site) support. Sites have to support Gears API in order for end users to enjoy benefits of Gears. And how many sites nowadays want to sign on to support Gears? Hence, limit support & acceptance. Maybe it'll grow over time like OpenID.
Gears is included in the Android 1.0 platform. All G1 phones have Gears built-in.
Most of Gears is being standardised as part of HTML5 and implemented by the other browsers anyway. For example, worker pools and offline access are part of Firefox 3.1, and client databases were actually already part of Webkit before Google got involved.
So Gears is mostly used by Google for influencing other browser makers like Mozilla / Apple / Microsoft, to enhance their own browsers. They don't really need to push Gears for end users.
Gears aka 'You need to fix your firefox now, have a good day' extension.
Gears is a great technology and certainly useful for RIA dev- that's why we built Titanium on top of Gears and other open source technologies like Webkit. Titanium allows developers to build rich internet applications that run natively on the desktop (Windows, Mac, and Linux) using open web languages like HTML, CSS, and Javascript as well as Flash and Silverlight. Thought you'd be interested to check out this open source alternative to AIR: http://titaniumapp.com
Already have some demo apps up that you can try
David at Appcelerator
Dojo Offline tried to improve Gears but I never understod why Brad developed dojo offline instead of putting everything to gears directly
http://dojotoolkit.org/offline