Bernard Lunn on the ReadWriteWeb blog published an article today called Why is Google Not Deploying Gears Aggressively?. In it he pulls from interviews with Dave Girouard, President of Google Enterprise and Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering.
To prove their slow adoption of Gears he points out that Zoho (the cloud-based Office suite that competes with Google Docs, etc) has been using it for nearly 18 months.
Further:
So, the big question is, “When will Gmail enable offline use via Gears?” I posed this question to Dave Grirouard, President of Google Enterprise. The response was along the lines of, making it work on the scale of Gmail is not a trivial engineering challenge. That sort of made sense. But Gears has been out for a long time; it is a critical feature, and Google has the best software engineering talent on the planet.
The next point muses on Chrome, Google’s browser
Is Google holding up Gears until Chrome can support Gears? We hope not. That seems contrary to its philosophy to date, which has been to couple them very loosely. So that is probably just coincidence.
(The comments point out that Chrome bundles Gears already, so perhaps that line of thinking is moot.)
In terms of Mobile, the author “was told that Gears in a mobile browser was, of course, the “holy grail.”"