Google Docs offline illustrates open source maturity

Now that Microsoft Word is a standard, maybe Redmond should worry about making certain it stays a leader.

Sridhar Vembu of ZohoThe rapid delivery of an offline feature to Google Docs illustrates the benefits of standardization and the maturity of online office suites, according to a competitor.

Sridhar Vembu (right), co-founder of AdventNet, which produces Zoho, an online office suite, writes that the offline capability for Google Docs is based on Google Gears, which Zoho used a few months ago to add the same capabilities to its Zoho Writer.

Vembu writes that Zoho originally sought to add the offline capability itself, then switched to Gears once it was announced.

Google made the right decision to open source this technology, so that the entire ecosystem can rally around a common standard for offline functionality. We are proud to be early adopters of this technology. We differentiate Zoho on features & functions that add real value to users, rather than on framework/infrastructure level issues, like which plug-in to use for the offline edition.

Zoho has also sought to differentiate itself by quickly releasing a mobile edition of its software. But rather than focusing on Zoho’s efforts, Vembu wanted to emphasize what Google’s open source decision means to the development process.

“It is sometimes hard to believe that the entire space is just over 2 years old, considering how far things have come. This pace will continue, even intensify, over the next few months.”

The key word in the sentence above, it seems to me, is months. When applications start changing on Internet time, something has most definitely changed.