If you believe that always-on, anywhere network connectivity is going to be pervasive in the near future, you might well predict the demise of offline applications.
But offline will not go away anytime soon, and the offline experience will become more - not less - important in the future, says Douglas Merrill, Google's vice president of engineering and company CIO.
Merrill, who spoke at the imbX conference, told the Daily yesterday that network pervasiveness will continue and hopefully someday will cover everyone in the world. 'But today it doesn't, and who knows when it actually will,' he says. 'What we need is a bridging strategy to fill those interstitial spaces between network A and network B.'
By a bridging strategy, Merrill was referring to Google Gears, the beta Web browser extension, which the company released last month to let people use web applications when disconnected from the Internet. The company has also released the source code of Google Gears for application developers to build their own Web applications with offline functionalities.
'With Google Gears, we want to build a bridge so that people can continue to work and collaborate with each other when they are fully disconnected,' he says.
Another reason why offline needs to get better is simply because online is becoming more important, he says. This is exacerbating the productivity loss when users can't get connected to the web and work on shared documents.
'A few years ago, this would not have been so big a deal - all of your files would have been stored on your machines. But it is becoming more and more rare that you will be working on a document by yourself,' he says.
'What is important today is the state of the information. Increasingly, documents are living in the network cloud, not necessarily in the machines,' he says.
When asked about the next guise of Google Gears, he demurs at being specific about upcoming features, but suggests how offline functionalities can benefit the company's other products in future.
'We haven't announced anything yet - that Gears will work with Gmail or Google Docs and Spreadsheets - but you can sort of imagine [how that might look like]. For now, we have announced Gears working with Google reader, which is our commercial tool.'