As other major vendors have started to come out with their own online office and collaboration suites, Google is going old-school and is taking its own, bit by bit, offline. Today, the Gmail team announced that Gmail will be the next Google application to be integrated with the company's Gears off-line operating feature, following sibling Apps in that direction.

As with Apps, the Gears off-line functionality promises to be limited compared to the total functionality of the product online, but this may be more understandable and acceptable to most people with an e-mail application, any sort of which is inherently crippled a bit when it's offline. Less certain is whether or not the company's radical approach to caching, utilizing a "we know better than you do what you are going to want, so hush and be happy" algorithm to determine which messages to make available offline. Although this seems likely to upset some users, it's a position the company has likely forced itself into by encouraging users to think of the inbox as a bottomless, but searchable, pit. The "keep by default" behavior this has engendered is at odds with the corporate mantra of "read it and trash it" which evolved from limited and expensive storage space, and has resulted in caches far larger than other systems generally have to deal with. To what extent this can be tweaked by the user, and how successful it will be at keeping the right messages, will only be clear in time.

This topples another domino in the list of objections to using Apps as a corporate system. As is typical of Google, the new feature is being deployed as a "beta" (whatever that means anymore) with no projected production release date available at this time.

Also of interest to Apps account holders is the fact that the company is also unveiling Gears for Google Calendar for their use; this is an even more crippled implementation, allowing only read access, but it's better than nothing. Google Calendar has had some difficulty finding a serious market in the business world anyway; if this is the extent of Google's effort to change that status, it doesn't bode well.