Users See Promise, Pitfalls Of Google GearsUsers See Promise, Pitfalls Of Google Gears

Daily sees potential down the road, though. If Google adds Gmail and Google Calendar to the list of Gears-supported apps, it could give Prudential agents in the field access to their e-mail archives and calendar when they aren't online. Daily isn't alone in hoping that's the road Google travels.

"I think that it has a lot of usage potential," said Aung Zayar Lwin, head of IT at building consultancy Drew George & Partners, in San Diego. "Even though we have an office, we are a small consulting firm and people often go out to talk to clients."

As a small company, however, Drew George won't be able to develop ties to Google Gears itself, so Lwin is counting on Google and others to do the dirty work, especially for Gmail and Google Calendar, which Drew George uses.

Neither Daily nor Lwin sees Google Gears as reason to get rid of Microsoft Office and move to Google Apps wholesale any time soon. Prudential just bought new Office licenses, and Lwin imagines Drew George will eventually move to Office 2007. Offline access or not, feature parity just isn't there yet with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. For example, it's not easy to manage batches of Google documents, and Excel power users are limited by Google Spreadsheets' relatively minimal features. The only reason Lwin sees to even experiment with Google Docs and Spreadsheets right now is for collaboration -- and of course that doesn't work in offline mode.

For Sannier, as for many IT pros, the debut of Google Gears is more about intriguing possibilities than immediate pay-off. The combination of Google's Web-based model with "thin-client" software applications has almost limitless potential.

"Now they have an architecture that allows them to develop the software with a stronger off-line client component, but still heavily integrated with their Web-based services," mused Sannier. "It's really almost a new paradigm in the way you think about delivering software.

"It's kind of like when the client-server model emerged. It's a different way to build and architect software."