News Or Not?

To stay current with news about Google Apps I have subscribed to Google Alerts. Google Alerts monitors the Internet for news about Google Apps (or any other subject one wants to be alerted about). I started the Google Alert subscription on March 14, 2008. I have been diligent about monitoring and reading the alerts. To date I have received a total of 109 alerts. I have read every alert email message and followed most of the alert links to the source articles. While I have been alerted to some news, mostly I have been underwhelmed with news that is not news. The real news is most people and organizations writing about Google Apps don’t really know or understand anything about Google Apps. Let me explain….

Many of the recent alerts have been about Google Gears and the ability to use Google Apps without being attached to the Internet. The alerts were about Googles’ recent release of a test version of Google Docs that supports Google Gears. Google Gears has been around for some time and there are a number of web based application providers that have implemented Google Gears: Interestingly enough Zoho.com has implemented Google Gears probably much better than Google. The conundrum over Google Gears is that most of the Google Apps don’t currently use Google Gears. In short, while the prospect of the availability of Google Apps in an off-line mode extends the power of Google Apps, Google has not progressed very far in using Google Gears in Google Apps. (See a great article covering the Google Gears disappointment at PCWorld)

Personally I think the issue of not being able to use Google Apps offline is a non issue. That debate, however, is an article for a different day. Google Gears is, however, an important tool that must be widely deployed in all of the Google Apps to overcome the IT nay-sayers. While Googles’ announcement of a test version of Google Docs that supports Google Gears is news, what is not news is that Google Gears exists and that Google intends to deploy Google Gears in all of the Google Apps. If, however, you were to believe the news presented in the many alert stories I read, one would think that the concept of Google Gears and off-line application use is a brand new idea to Google.

Google Gears is not news, or at least it is not new news. In addition Googles’ efforts to extend their solutions as off-line enabled is not news either. What is news, in my opinion, is how ignorant most of the business community is about Google Apps. Businesses and business managers need to wake up and realize that the world of Internet based computing and the Internet as the computer is here, it has been here for some time, and more importantly, it is ready for production use today.