» Podcast: ‘Google Gears’ vies to be de facto tech for offline Web apps | Berlind’s Testbed | ZDNet.com

Google’s Upson was not shy about his company’s motives for open sourcing the technology. The idea, according to him, is to make it a standard in the marketplace now, without the need for standards bodies. With so few Web app providers offering such offline capability and with Google’s war-chest behind the effort, the tech stands a pretty good chance at becoming the overnight defacto standard for running Web apps offline. At the same time, where companies have committed to an offline architecture as Zimbra has with its Zimbra Desktop (whose offline capability is powered by Java), those companies may be forced to completely reconsider that architecture if Google Gears gets market traction.