GMail under investigation for killing … Outlook

Here we go again.

Once more some-one in need of a weekend post to make it to Techmeme latches on to the fact that GMail has added ‘offline’ capabilities to its web email client and how that is going to be the death of Microsoft’s Outlook. It never fails that the moment Google does something that others have been for sometime before them it is the beginning of the end for some Microsoft product. In this case Zoho’s email client, Yahoo’s Zimbra and Hotmail through Windows Live Mail have had this kind of ‘offline’ ability for some time but it isn’t either one of those apps that GMail is going to kill. No, it’s one of the most widely used e-mail / calendaring / Task Management client both in and out of the corporate world that GMail is going to bring to its knees and then bury.

Ya … okay whatever you say bud. Think you could share those drugs you must be on?

This isn’t to say that GMail won’t solidify its position as the MacBook Pro Web 2.0 love everything Apple hate every Microsoft crowd with the addition of this ‘offline’ mode. This isn’t to say that GMail won’t continue to gain users because it will but to suggest that Outlook is now going the way of the Dodo bird is the height of ridiculousness.

The author of this Techmeme bait post Farhad Manjoo goes on to add

Now that Gmail has bested the Outlooks of the world, it’s a good time to assess the state of desktop software. There are some things that work better on your computer (your music app, your photo editor, your spreadsheets), and there are some that work better online (everything else).

Well if this past week is any indicate what with Magnolia having to go offline because they lost all the user data or Google having a hiccup and labelling every site on the as malware my conviction that some things at this point in time belong more on the desktop than the web. Chief among these applications is the very lifeblood of our online lives – the email client. The idea that I could be responsible if I should ever lose my data for some reason would pale in comparison to the reaction I would have if say for some reason Google lost my data either by a freak hardware failure of a deliberate deletion ala Facebook or Flickr.

It is one thing to place your trust in something within your own control; such as your email but another to do the same thing with a web service that has no liability because the service is free. this is what corporate environments look at when it comes to the valuable electronic data that it generates everyday. So unless things change a lot in this regard we will probably see more of these delusional types of claims but in the end – sorry but GMail will never kill off Outlook or any desktop application.