Nice post from Nick. Gears is a big deal because it kicks off the battle for ‘office’ applications that reside in the ether … on your hard drive AND on the network.
This will drive bank IT fold crazy … welcome to Web 2.0.
Gears, Google’s newly introduced set of software tools that allows web-based programs to continue to run even when a user loses his Internet connection, is a modern-day analogue to Reuters’ carrier pigeons.
PS… if you want to see how this works, and you are a Google Reader user, go to home, and follow the links. Then you can read your feeds in a browser, offline …. prepare to be confused !!!
Bankwatch 
Most of the analysts (Forrester et al) have been talking up the concept of rich client applications that can work both online and offline. And of course we have all the Web 2.0 components that, it seems, can do everything short of checking your refrigerator and ordering your groceries (but wait, someone was working on that as well…)
Google Gears, if one were to use it as a basis for developing banking software, could serve three key purposes
a. Offline operations by bank staff when connectivity to the data centre is lost (yes this happens). Replace the branch server with these kind of applications.
b. Build applications for travelling salesforce which work out of the browser, both online and offline.
b. Build offline capabilities for bank customers, eliminating the need for expensive to maintain custom-built desktop applications, which are currently the only way to deliver offline functionality to customers.
Key concerns would be, of course, around
a. Data security in the cache
b. Amount of storage reqmts for the cache
c. Synchronising offline and online data once connectivity is established