Google had a couple of interesting things to say this week, along with a few words from Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs.

First up was Google releasing Google Gears, a technology for developing off-line Web 2.0 applications. Adobe is doing the same kind of thing with Apollo. This type of technology enables what I call “intermittently connected” applications — applications which need to operate in both a connected mode and an unconnected mode. This capability is clearly important to any road warrior carrying a laptop. Business models continue to make airplane connectivity a rare possibility, much less simple and cheap.

Less obvious is why this is so important on mobile. Having spent a bit of time over the last 5 years involved with VCs and corp dev types, I can’t begin to count how many people think that with mobile networks attaining higher bandwidth and greater coverage, the browser is good enough.

Theoretically, this might be true, but in reality I think these people don’t truly use mobile data services outside the occasional test. In many ways, its the same 80/20 problem I talked about yesterday — even if the network is available at high speeds 80% of the time, if the 20% use cases fall off a cliff (airplanes, urban canyons, rural motorways), the overall value diminishes disproportionately. Mobile sets an expectation for access everytime and everwhere. When it fails to deliver on that expectation, trust is destroyed and subsequently value.

With Google Gears extending AJAX and Adobe Apollo extending Flash/FLEX, we have two well funded and smart companies building platforms that can address this problem. Importantly, building these platforms based on existing technologies promises to leverage existing development & creative communities.

Next, we have Google’s Eric Schmidt talking at the Wall Street Journal technology conference. Speaking at the conference, Mr. Schmidt talks about Google continuing to invest in more mobile applications –

Instead of saying ‘mobile, mobile, mobile,’ I should be saying ‘apps, apps, apps’

Lastly, we have Bill Gates and Steve Jobs speaking at the same conference. As reported in InfoWorld, both Gates and Jobs believe in rich clients. Gates believes the future of computing is what he describes as “rich local functionality” where “it’s using local richness together with richness elsewhere.” Jobs points to Google Maps functionality embedded on Apple’s iPhone:

The experience is unbelievable, way better than a computer. And that client app is the result of a lot of technology on the client. And you can’t do that stuff in a browser

I am heartened to see consensus building on the mobile programming paradigm.

Update:

I have had a couple of readers ask me if this is an anti-browser strategy. Far from the case as both of these solutions leverage the browser in their rendering engines. What this does do is strengthen Nokia’s strategy for open sourcing their browser (WebKit) and weaken “closed” browser solutions by Openwave, Opera, Access, and Teleca. As handset manufacturers implement these platforms they are going to want to avoid duplicating protocol stacks, parsers, DOMs, and renderers — hard to do when the browser is a black box.