As Mike Arrington points out at TechCrunch, Zoho has launched offline support for its Zoho Writer application (although it's read-only for now) using Google Gears - which is more than a little ironic, considering Google still hasn't offered the same functionality for Google Docs.
But while that irony makes for a funny post, does it really amount to anything from a competitive point of view? I'm not so sure it does. Implementing Gears support for Google Docs would probably take about half an hour of programming time - and in all likelihood requires little more than a piece of script to be turned on.
There's no question that having offline support is a key feature, and Zoho should be congratulated for offering it. But Is being first enough to give it any kind of compelling advantage over Google Docs? Unlikely.
link to original post