Google moves to take on Microsoft
Google will announce an initiative on Thursday that will take its applications beyond the web and challenge Microsoft on its home turf of the computer hard-drive. — The internet company is launching Google Gears, an open-source technology for creating offline web applications.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google had already aimed its business-application push at Microsoft in February; that earlier business-software challenge made web productivity tools the competitive front. Google Gears extends that contest by giving developers a way to make web applications function offline on a computer's hard drive.
The same-day coverage across developer-focused outlets underscores that Gears is being positioned as an open-source building block, not simply as a feature of one Google service.
First-order effects
- Developers can use Google Gears to add offline behavior to web applications, reducing the practical distinction between browser-based software and software installed on a PC.
- Microsoft faces a more direct challenge on the hard drive, where offline capability had reinforced the advantage of conventional desktop applications.
Second-order effects
- Google's ability to attract developers becomes central: applications built on Gears can make its web-software approach more viable for users who cannot stay connected.
- Microsoft must compete not only on application features but on whether its own web strategy can match the offline reliability developers can build with Google's toolkit.
Third-order effects
- If developers adopt the open-source toolkit, application competition shifts toward web platforms that can combine online delivery with local storage and offline use, weakening the desktop-versus-web divide.
- The contest between Google and Microsoft increasingly turns on developer ecosystems and application infrastructure rather than a single productivity product.
The trend: Web applications are adding the offline capabilities that had separated desktop software from browser-based services, widening the platform contest between Google and Microsoft.