Zoho Writer: Where the hell is Google?

So Zoho — the online Office-style productivity suite company — has launched offline support for its Zoho Writer word-processing feature/service, which I quite like (I also use their presentation app, Zoho Show, which is excellent). Digital Inspiration originally broke the story, but Mike has some details at TechCrunch too.

As Eric Eldon at VentureBeat notes, Zoho has allowed users of Zoho Writer to read their documents offline for some time now, but not to edit them and then sync them later when they get online again. It has now added the latter feature, thanks to Google’s “Gears” technology, which allows online/offline syncing and which Google already uses in Google Reader.

My only question is this: Why on earth can’t we do the same thing with Google Docs? Google Gears has been out in the marketplace for months, and presumably was internally available for months before that. And we can already use it in Google Reader (although it isn’t much use with a dial-up connection, let me tell you).

So why can little Zoho somehow manage to integrate Google Gears and its document-editing features, but Google can’t? What the heck are all those PhDs doing over there at the Googleplex?

Share: