Google has been rocking lately with updates to Google Apps.  Every week there seems to be more news coming out of Mountain View.  The latest news, hot of the press from Google’s Official Blog, is more evidence that this technology might just turn out to be as disruptive to Microsoft as anything else happening right now:

Now I can create, edit, publish, and fly on an airplane without loading up any Microsoft programs.

Download Gears

What is Gears?
Basically, it is a framework for offline web application development. In other words, write-once, deploy once, and allow your users to access your applications when they are connected to the Internet, or not. Very cool.

The Big Story
Once Google puts out Gears for Google Apps, the email/calendar/docs/spreadsheet functions will have moved passed one the large pain points: “How do I access my email from the plane/when the internet is out/when I am offline?” This is obviously going to make Redmond very antsy, as it will certainly make Apps easier to sell to IT folks and make it a real competitor to Office for many businesses out there.

Stay tuned, I’ll post more from the conference or when I get back.