While there is no plan currently, eventually taking all Google properties offline would make sense to Google's Australia and New Zealand engineering director, Alan Noble.
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"There's no concrete plan; I think if one were to extrapolate, something like that would make sense eventually. There's no real plan right now." Noble said in an interview with Builder AU.
Noble said that the BSD licensing of Google Gears is a risk but a risk that Google is prepared to take.
"We want it to be out there, we want it to be open, we want to get adoption happening as quickly as possible".
Noble's comments came as Google kicked off the global Google Developer Day with the Australian event in Sydney this morning -- making it the first to hear of the announcement of Google's new offline browsing plug-in Google Gears.
The conference drew over seven hundred registrations, making it the second largest of the regional conferences. Registrations were so high that the venue was changed at the last minute from the Hilton in Sydney's CBD to the Australian Technology Park in Redfern.
During his keynote, Noble spoke of the new model of application development in the Web 2.0 world: a combination of open source and open standards mashed up with free data and driven by ad revenue. "Mashups are rapidly becoming the way of creating web apps." he told an expectant crowd. "At the end of the day we want the Web browser to be the platform for applications."
Noble presented Google Gears as an application not competing with any other products on the market, giving examples of how it could be used with services from Amazon and Yahoo. The partnership between Google, Apple, Mozilla, Adobe and Opera was stressed as Google hopes that Google Gears will become the standard for offline caching. Noble said that Microsoft had not yet been approached to enter into the partnership.
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