Google Gears, and the real power game

[jducoeur]

There's a fascinating little article over on TechCrunch, on the subject of Google Gears. If you're doing Web development, and like me had assumed that Gears was just a way to do caching for offline capability, it's well worth reading. Google is playing a much bigger and more important game than it appears at first blush, and Gears is starting to look more like a serious first step towards blending the client and the cloud.

Really, it's a smart medium-term game: it makes the thin client look really viable. It's taken decades to get there, but I am seriously considering that my next computer may be nothing *but* a thin client: a low-power notebook whose main purpose is to hold a browser. Gears is adding exactly the sort of functionality needed to make a "smart client" that really hums: local databases, multi-threading support, local page generation and so on. Microsoft's worst fears -- that Google would start turning into an "online operating system" -- are starting to look very real...