When you are a multi-billion dollar company, you can develop all kinds of software that is interesting and can benefit users. If you’re Microsoft, you can buy companies and make their software and standards part of your proprietary arsenal. If you’re a giant like Google, you can do some interesting and forward-thinking things for users who aren’t always lining their pockets in the first place.

I’m not complaining about Microsoft (okay, maybe a little), I’m just telling it like it is. In fact, I love Microsoft products because they work (most of the time) and work together as they should. It’s just Microsoft’s business monopoly that I’m opposed to. Microsoft seems to have forgotten that users made them what they are, and they do so by choice.

For most of the Microsoft products available, there actually IS an alternative option, such as open source software, ie Open Office, Firefox. Even when it comes to operating systems, you can choose Linux. (I don’t recommend you do this, unless you are a good network administrator.) Ask your local computer reseller for help when you have a problem with your Linux operating system and you are on the road to the operating system without a paddle.

In the free enterprise world we live in, I’m glad there’s a choice. Thanks also Apple! I’ll probably never buy an Apple computer, but I’m glad they’re on the market to keep the options available and maintain fairness in the market.

Google has released something pretty exciting called “Google Gears.” This isn’t going to make headline news, but it’s a revolutionary piece of software nonetheless.

Web-based software is great for doing all sorts of things while you’re connected to the Internet, like downloading RSS feeds (Google Reader is a good example), but what about when you’re offline? If you bring your laptop to Ma and Pa’s pancake house, thinking you might use their WIFI, and find out that they think WIFI is short for waffle, what can you do?

Well, Google Gears caches your data so that you can continue working on your web apps offline using the stored data. It’s a preview version, but it now works with Google Reader and is supported by Adobe, Mozilla and Opera. Did I mention it’s from Google? That means it’s almost guaranteed to be a hit.

So if you want to access your Google Reader fonts from the subway in New York City or in the middle of Missouri somewhere, you can. What you’ll find is that it’s surprisingly fast, snappy even, because it uses local data. This means that even if your network is down or acting a bit slow on any given day, you can still access your readers’ feeds in a timely manner.

Those of you who use Outlook for email will find this a familiar type of functionality. Even if your Internet connection goes down, you can still access your email from your most recently downloaded emails. When you reconnect to the Internet, you will see the new emails and you will be able to send the newly created emails that you wanted to send.

As for a quick overview of the technology, Google Gears uses an SQL database, and since it’s open source, you can count on it to be robust with all eyes examining the code. Applications run much faster and can be almost 100% reliable available. Say you’re giving a web-based presentation to 100 people, wouldn’t you like to know that you can guarantee the presentation will run regardless of the reliability of your current Internet connection?

Over a million copies of google gears have been downloaded so far. If you want to try it, go to http://gears.google.com/

Here’s the Google Gears blog, if you want more information than you’re probably interested in, on the subject. http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/

I hope this information helps your SEO strategy.