Google Gears - any guessing who will come next?

Google have announced a platform for building offline capable web applications (Scoble covers the details well). I think everyone has noticed the inherant problem that SaaS desktop applications only work online (in fact, even I posted about offline problems with SaaS a couple of months ago), but this now removes that barrier.

This is a huge deal - it really challenges he traditional software model - and Microsoft must be a little concerned about how this impacts MS Office!

Scoble, also just posted an update that someone else is "going offline" tomorrow. With all the talks of acquisitions lately I'm hoping that it's salesforce.com. Now that would be something!

<update> So I guess I got that one wrong - looks like Real Networks have taken video content offline. I'd still love to see SFC do the same.