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As you may have heard, Zoho Writer was released, which is the first phase for Zoho to offline their office suite.

Michael Arrington said:

Zoho, which competes head-on with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, managed to launch offline functionality on their product before Google did. The fact that they are using Google software to do this makes the story somewhat ironic.

I actually see this as a good thing. By opening up Gears early on in the process, through open source, everyone gets to play. It is a big show of faith for Gears. Of course, Google could have held Gears back and released it at the same time as a bunch of offline Google applications, but that isn't the point. Gears is about making the Web a better place through offline, and we want the Web to be able to benefit.

That is why I am excited to see Writer join the list of developers that use Gears.