Google Gears: I've seen it all before
Back in 2002 I was director of marketing for UserLand Software. You know, Dave Winer's company. In January of 2002 we shipped Radio UserLand. It was pretty darn bleeding edge for its time. It had a built-in Web server. A built-in database.
Context & Ripple Effects
Scoble writes this from the inside: he was UserLand Software's marketing director when Radio UserLand shipped in January 2002 with a built-in web server and built-in database, and he reads Google's Gears as that same local-runtime architecture finally arriving at platform scale. The comparison carries weight because he helped market the original.
It also lands in a familiar arc of Google launches meeting skeptical takes — Techdirt's disappointment over what Google Video actually delivered set the template in January 2006 — while Dave Winer, UserLand's founder, had spent late 2005 building his own RSS aggregator, keeping the independent-toolmaker side of this history active. That Search Engine Land picked up the post the same day shows how far the 'seen it before' framing traveled.
First-order effects
- Google ships Gears as an offline-capable web runtime, and the loudest early frame comes from someone who says UserLand shipped the equivalent — built-in server plus database — five years earlier, forcing developers weighing the SDK to judge it against Radio UserLand rather than against nothing.
Second-order effects
- With Search Engine Land carrying the argument the same day, Google's launch narrative has to compete with a prior-art story in the trade press at exactly the moment adoption decisions get made.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, capabilities pioneered by small independent shops like UserLand keep being absorbed into big-platform runtimes, leaving the original vendors remembered as precedents rather than beneficiaries of the architecture they built.
The trend: Core web-platform capabilities keep migrating from small independent toolmakers into big-company runtimes, with every major launch immediately measured against the smaller products that shipped the idea first.