Google Gears, a new release that currently in beta mode, first came courtesy of Google because of the Google Developer Day, as mentioned in Google’s official blog. It is an open source browser extension, enables not just our applications but everyone’s applications work offline. This product was an incremental technology, as Google Gears’ engineers said, “Gears is an incremental improvement to the web as it is today. It adds just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline.”

I believe this release was a move by Google aimed at finding new markets especially open source field among the underserved. It is a good product strategy, a good forward-looking strategy.