Google Gears means you can work on stuff without a Web connection. It’s applications sitting on your desktop. But is it just another of many Web 2.0 apps not quite business ready? Depends on what you want to do. Is it Enterprise viable? We don’t think so. But that is the nature of many Web 2.0 applications and through mass use by small businesses and consumers, Google Gears has broader potential.

Few people realize that Google generates significant revenue from selling dedicated servers to the Enterprise market for document and email searching and archiving. These Google servers are powerful, easy to implement and work very reliably - inside the Enterprise firewall. Many large multinational law firms, who generate massive amounts of documentation, rely deeply on Google servers. By pushing Google Gears to the consumer and small business, the current ideal market space, Google gets the market to play with it and develop practical uses. All of which is monitored by Google for later implementation into Enterprise networks and improvements for Cloud Computing applications. Eventually, Google may become a viable threat to Microsofts vaunted Enterprise plays.

For now Google Gears is very viable to power Web people and to small businesses. The most practical application for Google Gears right now is Buxfer, a financial management tool. There are some time management applications as well and some integration with Zoho. There is no current integration with Gmail, but one can assume that will come. We don’t find that Google Gears is compelling enough to replace Microsoft Office yet, for either the Mac or Windows. The Mac Office2008 is a vast improvement and works tightly with the Mac OS. Sharepoint still offers better online to offline capability than Google Gears as well, at least for the larger organization.

So while Google Gears is interesting and sure to become increasingly viable, it’s still a small business product and presents little value to a company of more than 30 people with serious productivity tool needs. As more apps are built to integrate and Google ties in it’s mobile OS, Android, we may see broader uses develop. We believe the Google strategy is to see how Gears is used and thrown about to prepare it for a more industrial-grade stand-alone server option for the Enterprise market.