Well, I don’t know. It depends upon how security concious the corporate folks want to be. For one thing, there are reasons to not put information on a web-based service outside your corporate network.

True, if it isn’t already possible, I imagine that soon business will be able to run a Google application server on their corporate intranet. And there are advantages to that. OTOH, that undermines Google’s revenue model, though they certainly can change that.

Still, color me skeptical, simply because the evil Micro$uck still has enormous mindshare. And people tend to stick with what they’ve been using.

The other bothersome thing about this is that running web-based apps solely on the local machine opens up some cracking possibilities as well. One thing that is supposed to happen with browser-based apps is that they run in a virtual “sandbox”, meaning they have no, or very limited, access to resources, particularly files and memory, on the local machine. In order to do what Google Gears is doing, they have to put a little hole in there. Granted, it’s probably run through the web server, and maybe everything is stored in the database, but I’m still leary of it.

I’ll need to see more about implementation before I worry about security. Don’t imagine that I’m expecting Google’s stuff to dropkick Microsoft out the business sector--I just think that we finally see how they plan to transition their Web-based productivity services to the desktop and that MS has to be taking note.