What To Make Of Google Gears
Being a non-developer I was a bit of a fish out of water at Google Developer Day yesterday. The event, which took place in the 10 countries where Google has offices, was intended to showcase Google Gears and the company's various APIs.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google spent yesterday staging Developer Day simultaneously in the 10 countries where it has offices, with 63 session videos already posted to YouTube as proof of scale. The centerpiece is Google Gears — a layer that lets browser-based applications keep working without a connection — pitched alongside the company's growing stack of APIs to an audience the Search Engine Land author admits left non-developers feeling like fish out of water.
The developer push is not isolated: the same day brought confirmation of the FeedBurner acquisition and a co-branded Book Search tool for publishers unveiled at BookExpo America. Google is courting two constituencies at once — the developers who build web apps and the publishers who distribute content — and Gears is its most technical overture yet.
First-order effects
- Web application developers gain a supported path to offline functionality through Gears, removing the always-connected constraint that has kept serious apps in desktop software.
Second-order effects
- Every publisher taking the co-branded [[a:0|]] Book Search tool or FeedBurner feeds deepens its operational dependence on Google-hosted infrastructure, raising switching costs that are invisible until they are not.
Third-order effects
- If Gears-style offline capability becomes table stakes, the browser starts displacing desktop applications as the default runtime — and whoever supplies the bridging layer, standards or not, holds outsized leverage over the developer ecosystem.
The trend: Google is working to turn the browser from a document viewer into an application platform, with Gears as the developer-facing bridge while formal standards lag.