Today, Google added long-overdue support for offline message-caching in Gmail using their Google Gears browser plugin  (read more at TechCrunch). The importance of this for Google’s business strategy cannot be emphasized enough.  Gmail is one of Google’s most widely used services and one of their top brands, and they were really lagging behind competitors such as Yahoo! Mail and Zoho Mail in this aspect, especially considering that Google created Google Gears and implemented it a year ago for Google Reader, the content-storage needs of which is not much different from Gmail.  Having offline access to Google Apps email should be a significant encouragement for organizations to adopt Google Apps, with the fear of temporary downtime removed.

I switched to Thunderbird for accessing my Gmail mail many months ago because I realized that I was willing to sacrifice some of the convenience of Gmail’s interface for offline access.  I may switch back to using Gmail now that I can have both offline access to my email and its superior interface and design.

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